When an employee cancels a pending expense
Why a pending expense can disappear from your queue, what cancellation does to the row and the reserved allowance, and what to do instead once a review has started.
Employees can cancel their own expense report while it is still waiting for review, so a row you saw in your queue can simply disappear. This is normal: it usually means the person uploaded the wrong receipt or changed their mind before anyone reviewed it. This article explains exactly when a cancellation is possible, what it changes, and what to do when a report needs removing after a review has already started.
When an employee can cancel
The cancel option only appears for the employee while the report is in the earliest state:
- The expense is an uploaded expense report, not a purchase or an adjustment.
- Its status is still Pending.
- No reviewer has acted yet: every approver is still waiting to decide.
The employee finds the Cancel this expense report button by opening the report from My benefits. As soon as any reviewer approves, declines, or requests changes, that button disappears and the employee can no longer cancel. At that point CLVR tells them to contact their HR contact instead.
Cancellation is an employee action on their own report. There is no cancel button in your expense queue, so you do not remove a report this way on someone's behalf.
What cancelling does
When an employee confirms the cancellation, CLVR:
- Permanently deletes the expense report and its uploaded receipt files.
- Releases the benefit allowance the report had reserved, so the employee's remaining balance returns to what it was before the upload.
- Recalculates any other pending reports the employee still has, so their cost breakdowns reflect the freed-up balance.
- Removes the row from your expense queue, since the report no longer exists.
The employee sees a short confirmation explaining that this permanently deletes the report and its receipts and releases the reserved allowance, and they confirm before anything happens.
A cancellation record is kept for the company even though the report row is gone. So if a pending report vanishes from your queue, it was cancelled by the employee, not lost.
What to do once a review has started
Once any reviewer has acted, the employee cannot cancel, and there is no HR cancel button to do it for them. If a report should not go through after a review has begun, the right action is to Decline it from the queue. Declining stops the report from reaching payroll and lets you give a reason, and the employee can then upload a corrected report if needed.
For the full decline flow and what the employee sees afterward, see declining an expense report.
Troubleshooting
- A report disappeared from my queue. The employee cancelled it while it was still pending. Nothing is wrong, and the allowance it held has been returned to them.
- An employee asked me to cancel their report. If it is still pending with no reviewer decision, ask them to open it under My benefits and use Cancel this expense report. If a review has already started, decline it instead.
- I need the report gone after it was approved or declined. Cancellation is not available at that point. Use the Decline action, then ask the employee to re-upload if a corrected claim is needed.