Download payroll reports

The Reports page end to end: how months are listed, previewing a month's file, downloading it and seeing who did, reporting a problem in a file to CLVR, when a report unlocks, which expenses it collects, and choosing the right export format, plus fixing greyed-out months and missing expenses.

The Reports page gives your HR team a month-by-month view of approved expenses that are ready to hand over to payroll. Each month sits on its own row with its total and where it stands, so you can see at a glance which months are ready, look inside a month's file before you download it, and download it in the format your payroll system expects. This page is part of the HR area, so it only appears for people on your HR team. This article walks the page end to end: how months are listed, how to preview and download one, how to report a problem in a file, when a report unlocks, which expenses it collects, and how to pick the right export format.

Open the page

The page lives in the HR section of the webapp, alongside your HR dashboard and employees. Open the HR menu and select Reports. If you are not on the HR team, the webapp sends you back to your own dashboard instead, so a missing page usually just means your account does not have HR access yet.

How months are listed

The page shows one year at a time. Use Year at the top to pick another year; the current year is shown first. Every row is a single payroll month, labelled with the month and year, for example March 2026. The list is sorted newest first; select the Period heading to turn the order around.

The page shows a continuous run of months from your earliest approved expense to your latest, with no gaps. That means a month with no approved expenses can still appear in the list as an empty row, which is normal.

Each row gives you a quick summary of the period:

• Period: the month, with how many approved expenses it holds, for example 7 expenses. Before the month's cutoff it reads 7 expenses so far.
• Total: what the month's expenses add up to, the same amounts as the Excel file's price column.
• Status: where the month stands, with a line under it:
  • Collecting: the cutoff has not passed yet, and approvals still join the month. The line says when it becomes available.
  • Ready: the cutoff has passed and nobody has downloaded the file yet. The line says since when.
  • Downloaded: somebody has downloaded the file. The line says which format, who and when, for example Fortnox Lön, Maria Holm, 26 Jul.
  • Rebuilt: CLVR rebuilt a file somebody had downloaded, after a problem you reported. The line says when, and not downloaded yet until somebody downloads the new one.
  • No approved expenses: there is nothing to export.
• Preview and Download on the right, but only when the month actually has expenses.

Search for a month by its name, or for a person: a search for an employee's name lists the months they have an expense in.

Preview a month's file

Select Preview on a month's row to open its file under the row, as a spreadsheet: column letters along the top, row numbers down the side, and the file's own headers and values exactly as the download will hold them. Above it you see the format, a short summary (for example 7 transactions, 6 people for Fortnox Lön, or 1 sheet, 7 rows, 13 columns for Excel), and when the file was last downloaded.

Use Format to switch between the formats your company gets. The preview and the download are built by the same code, so what you see is what you download.

In the Excel preview, when your company also gets a Fortnox Lön file, a row that the Fortnox file leaves out is marked in orange: a purchase paid from salary, or an amount of zero or less. Hover the marked amount to see why.

Before the month's cutoff the button reads Preview so far. The preview then shows the file as it would be built right now. Anything approved before the cutoff joins it, whatever its expense date; from the cutoff the file is final.

Download a month

When a month has expenses and is ready, select Download on its row to choose a format, or open the preview and select Download there. CLVR generates the file for that single month in the format you pick:

CLVR keeps every file it hands over. When you download the same month in the same format again and nothing in the month has changed, you get the stored file back, identical to the last one. See the re-downloading section below for what happens when something did change.

Report a problem in a file

If something in a month's file looks wrong, tell CLVR from the preview:

The report then sits above the month's file for everyone on your HR team, with its reference (such as CLVR-1024), its status and CLVR's answers. You can answer CLVR there, reopen a report that was resolved, and download the file CLVR rebuilt. See Report a problem in a payroll file for the whole flow.

When a month becomes available

A report is not available the instant the month begins. Each month becomes downloadable after your company's payroll cutoff has passed, which gives approvals time to settle before the figures are exported.

Until that point, the month's status is Collecting, the Download button is greyed out, and the line under the status reads Available followed by the day and time it unlocks, for example Available 25 Sep, 12:00. You can still open Preview so far to see the file as it stands. Availability is checked against the current time, so once that moment passes you can simply reload the page and the month becomes downloadable.

CLVR works out that date using one of two rules:

• With payroll settings saved, the report unlocks at your company's cutoff for that month. The cutoff is built from the Payroll cutoff day and time you set, adjusted by your chosen Weekend behavior if the cutoff lands on a Saturday or Sunday.
• Without payroll settings saved, CLVR falls back to the legacy schedule: the report unlocks on the first day of the month after the report month. If that first day falls on a Saturday or Sunday, it rolls forward to the following Monday. For example, a March report on legacy timing unlocks on the first business day of April.

A month with no approved expenses is different: it has nothing to put in a report, so it shows No approved expenses and no Preview or Download button at all. This is not a locked state waiting to unlock. An empty month stays without a Download option no matter how much time passes, because there is nothing to generate.

Which expenses appear in a report

Not every expense in CLVR ends up in a payroll report. A report only collects what is fully settled and ready to hand to payroll, and each expense lands in exactly one month based on when it was finalised.

A payroll report only includes expenses that are both:

• Approved, and
• one of two kinds: an Expense Report (a receipt an employee uploaded) or a Benefit Store purchase.

Anything still in Pending or marked Declined is left out. A report you download is always a snapshot of what was settled by that month, never a list of everything in flight.

CLVR places each approved expense in a month using its completion date, the moment the expense was finally approved (or auto-approved). An expense that has somehow not reached that finished state has no completion date and is skipped until it does. How that completion date maps to a month depends on whether your HR team has saved payroll cutoff settings:

• With a payroll cutoff saved, anything approved before the cutoff for its month goes into that month's report, and anything approved at or after the cutoff rolls into the next month's report. This is what lets you close a month cleanly.
• Without cutoff settings (legacy behaviour), each approved expense is grouped by the plain calendar month of its completion date. There is no roll-forward, so an expense approved on the last day of the month stays in that month.

Reports can also include one item that is not an everyday expense: a resolved overused-allowance salary deduction. When an employee leaves having spent more than their pro-rated allowance, your HR team chooses to recover it as a gross or net salary deduction, and once that record is resolved it is added to the report for the month it was resolved in. CLVR adds each resolved deduction only once, so the same amount is never sent to payroll twice.

Choose the right export format

When you select Download, CLVR offers the formats your company uses: Fortnox Lön and Excel for most companies, Excel and the two Flex HRM files for a company on Flex HRM. They all contain the same approved expenses for that month, so the only thing that changes is the layout. Switching format never changes the amounts or who they belong to; it only changes the file type and the column structure.

• Excel. Choose this when you want to read the report yourself. It is a plain .xlsx workbook with CLVR's own readable column layout, so you can open it in Excel, Numbers, or Google Sheets and review the amounts per employee before anything is imported elsewhere.
• Fortnox Lön. Choose this when you import payroll transactions into Fortnox. It is a PAXML 2.0 file (the standard Swedish payroll XML), not a spreadsheet, meant to be uploaded into Fortnox rather than opened and read by hand.
• Flex HRM (xlsx). Choose this for Flex HRM when you want the import template as an Excel workbook. It follows the standard FlexHRM row format and includes a column-description header row (Anstnr, Löneartsnr, Belopp, and so on), so it is both importable and readable.
• Flex HRM (dta). Choose this for machine import into Flex HRM (and Aspia, which reads the same format). It holds the same FlexHRM rows as the xlsx version but as a tab-delimited .dta text file, without the descriptive header row.

Quick guide:

• Just reviewing the figures? Use Excel.
• Importing into Fortnox? Use Fortnox Lön (PAXML).
• Importing into Flex HRM or Aspia? Use Flex HRM (dta), or Flex HRM (xlsx) if you want a readable copy.

Re-downloading the same month

Every download is checked against what the month holds right now. When nothing has changed since the last download in that format, you get the same stored file back, byte for byte, so a closed month does not change between downloads.

When something has changed, for example an expense was approved late into the month or moved to another category, the download is a new file built from the month as it stands. The earlier file is kept: select History next to Download in the preview to see every file the month has had in that format, who downloaded each one and when. Older files are marked Replaced and can still be downloaded, so you can compare them with what you imported into payroll.

Switching to a different format for the same month builds that format's file; each format keeps its own files and history.

Troubleshooting

The page is not in my menu. The Reports page is HR only. If you cannot see it, ask your HR contact to confirm your account has HR access.

A month has no Download button. That month shows No approved expenses, so there is nothing to export. Empty months are listed for completeness and can never be downloaded.

Download is greyed out. The month is still Collecting: it has not reached its availability date yet. Read the Available ... line under its status for the day and time, wait until then, and reload the page so availability is re-checked against the current time. The line shows a time as well as a day, so a month with an early-morning cutoff will not open the evening before. The current month is the one most often greyed out, because its cutoff is still in the future.

I need a month sooner. A member of your HR team can lower the cutoff in Payroll Settings: set an earlier Payroll cutoff day, Payroll cutoff hour, and Payroll cutoff minute, then save. Recent months are recomputed against the new cutoff, so a month whose new cutoff has already passed unlocks straight away. A new cutoff can move expenses between months, so a month you had already downloaded can give a different file next time. The earlier file stays under History.

The file downloaded instead of opening in a tab. If file storage is briefly unavailable, CLVR falls back to downloading the report straight to your browser. The file is the same, it just arrives as a download.

A newly approved expense is not in the report. First confirm the expense belongs in the month you expect: it must be Approved, it needs a completion date, and an approval at or after your cutoff correctly rolls into the next month (open the next month and you will find it there). When it belongs in the month, download the month again: the new download is built from the month as it stands and includes it, and History keeps the file you downloaded before.

An expense is missing from the export. First check it qualifies at all: only Approved expense reports and Benefit Store purchases are collected, and it has to land in the month you are looking at (an approval at or after your cutoff rolls into the next month). If it qualifies and is in the right month, the format you downloaded may be excluding it on purpose:

• It is in Excel but not in Flex HRM. Both Flex HRM files drop a line when no payroll code (löneart) is configured for that expense's category or benefit, or when the covered amount rounds to zero or less. The Excel export does not need a payroll code, so it lists the expense anyway. The fix is usually to set the category's payroll code on Payroll Settings.
• A Benefit Store purchase is missing from Fortnox. The Fortnox Lön export leaves out a purchase paid entirely from salary (a salary deduction rather than from the allowance), and any line whose cost is zero or negative. Open the Excel preview: those rows are marked in orange there.
• The amount is smaller than the receipt. Only the allowance-covered amount is exported; the part above the allowance is the employee's own cost and is never in a file. See why a payroll line amount differs from the receipt total.

Some money is intentionally outside every payroll file: receipt overshoot (the part of an uploaded receipt above the allowance, which is the employee's own cost) and Benefit Store salary-deduction remainders (recovered as a salary deduction handled outside these files). These export files report the benefit value the employer credited through the allowance for the period, so anything that did not cross the allowance boundary does not belong in them, by design.

I get the same file even though something changed. The file only changes when the month's rows do. A change that does not reach the file, such as an expense that rolled into the next month or one the format leaves out, gives you the same file. Open the preview to see what the month holds now.

Something in the file looks wrong. Open the month's preview and use Report a problem to point at the cell and tell CLVR. See Report a problem in a payroll file.