NDT Expense Management for Field Technicians

Field expenses and per diems, approved and rebilled to jobs. Request a demo. Affordable. Accessible. Fully customizable. Quote on request.

Why field expenses are a headache for NDT companies

An NDT company spends money in places the office never sees. A Level II technician drives four hours to a refinery shutdown, checks into a motel, buys couplant at the nearest hardware store because the drum on the truck ran dry, eats three meals a day on site and pays for parking at the contractor gate. A week later a crumpled envelope of receipts lands on someone’s desk. Half of them have faded, some are in a currency nobody expected, and none of them has the job number on it.

Then the questions start. Which job was this for? Was the motel covered by the client under the contract, or is it part of the day rate? Did the supervisor approve the extra night? Did the couplant purchase already go on the invoice that went out on Friday? By the time anyone works it out, the invoice has gone, the cost is buried in overheads and the job looks more profitable on paper than it really was.

Expenses in Atlantis NDT ERP is the standard Atlantis ERP Expenses app, set up for the way inspection crews actually spend money. Technicians record the expense when it happens, attach a photo of the receipt, pick the job it belongs to and submit it. Supervisors approve it and accounts reimburses it. Anything the client agreed to pay for can be pushed onto the job, so it ends up on the invoice and doesn’t get lost.

This page walks through how that works for a company with technicians in the field, what it connects to, and what we set up for you during implementation.

What the Expenses app does

At its core the app does five things, and none of them are exotic. It captures an expense with a date, amount, category, description and receipt. It links that expense to the employee who spent the money and, where you choose, to the project or sales order it belongs to. It groups expenses into a report that goes through an approval step. It posts approved expenses to accounting. And it either reimburses the employee or, for company-paid items, records the cost against the right account.

For an NDT company, the value is in how those five things are set up:

• Expense categories that match field work. Mileage, fuel, lodging, meals and per diem, site parking, tolls, consumables bought on site, PPE, courier of film or reports, and whatever else your crews routinely spend on. Each category maps to the right account, so your accountant stops reclassifying.
• Fixed-amount categories for per diems. Where you pay a flat daily allowance, the category can carry a set unit cost. The technician enters the number of days instead of typing an amount.
• Job links. Every expense can carry the project or sales order it belongs to, so the cost follows the job.
• Re-billing. Categories can be set to re-invoice at cost or at an agreed sales price, so client-rechargeable items flow through to the invoice.
• Who paid. Each line records whether the employee paid (and needs paying back) or the company paid with a company card.

None of this needs custom code. It is standard Atlantis ERP functionality, configured around NDT work during your implementation, and it sits in the same database as your jobs, timesheets, technicians and invoices.

How it runs day to day for a field technician

The technician side has to be quick, or it doesn’t happen. Nobody finishing a twelve-hour shift on a tank floor wants to fill in a form with fifteen fields.

1. Snap the receipt. From a phone browser, the technician opens Expenses, creates a new line and attaches a photo of the receipt. If you want it, we can also set up an expenses email alias, so forwarding a receipt creates the expense.
2. Pick the category and job. Choose “Lodging” or “Per diem” and select the job from a short list. Default values can pre-fill the obvious fields.
3. Add a note if it’s unusual. “Extra night, client delayed the permit to work” is the sentence that saves an argument two weeks later.
4. Submit. At the end of the trip, or at the end of the week, the technician bundles the lines into an expense report and submits it for approval.

That’s all the field side has to do. The technician can see where each report stands (submitted, approved, paid) without phoning the office to ask.

For crews on long rotations, like a six-week shutdown, we usually recommend weekly reports rather than one giant report at the end. It keeps approvals small and lets you re-bill as you go on jobs invoiced weekly. It also means a lost phone doesn’t cost you a month of receipts.

A note on connectivity. The ERP’s dedicated offline field app is built for inspection reports, not expenses. Expenses are entered through the normal ERP in a phone browser, so a technician in a dead zone photographs the receipt and logs the line once they have signal back at the hotel. In practice that’s when most people do it anyway.

Approvals: supervisors, project managers and accounts

Approvals are where expense control either works or turns into a pile of unread emails. In Atlantis ERP Expenses, each employee has an expense manager, usually their line manager or crew supervisor, who receives the submitted report and approves or refuses it. Refused reports go back to the technician with a reason, and the technician can fix and resubmit them.

For NDT companies we typically set up the chain like this:

• Crew supervisor or lead technician confirms the expense actually happened on the job, checks the per diem days match the days on site, and approves.
• Operations or project manager can be the approver instead, if your supervisors don’t have system access or you prefer approval to sit with whoever owns the job margin.
• Accounts posts the approved report to the ledger and pays it, either as a bank payment or through payroll, depending on how you reimburse.

The approval screen shows the receipt image beside the line, so the approver isn’t opening attachments one by one. Because each line carries the job, approvers can filter down to their own jobs.

Every approval, refusal and comment is logged in the record’s chatter with a name and timestamp. So when a client queries a recharged hotel bill six weeks after the invoice, you can show exactly who approved it, when, and what the note said. That audit trail is standard. For companies working under an ISO 9001 quality system, it’s the kind of record auditors like to see, even though expenses aren’t strictly in scope.

If you want a policy rule, for example that lodging above a set nightly limit needs a manager’s sign-off rather than a supervisor’s, we agree it during implementation and configure it as part of your customization scope.

Re-billing field costs to the client

This is where Expenses pays for itself. Most NDT contracts say something about travel, lodging and consumables. Some costs are included in the day rate, some are rechargeable at cost and some at cost plus handling. The contract is rarely the problem. The problem is that the recharge depends on a receipt reaching the person who raises the invoice, on time, with the job number on it.

In Atlantis ERP Expenses, each expense category has a re-invoicing policy:

• No re-invoicing for costs you absorb, such as the technician’s commute or items built into the day rate.
• At cost for items the client pays as spent, such as lodging on a remote site or a courier of RT film.
• At sales price for items you recharge at an agreed rate, such as mileage per kilometre or mile, or a fixed daily subsistence allowance.

When an approved expense linked to a sales order is posted, the rechargeable amount appears as a line on that sales order, ready for the next invoice. The person raising the invoice doesn’t have to chase receipts because they’re already there.

In Atlantis NDT ERP, invoices carry NDT-specific headers: NDT project, job or PO number, site, invoice type and industry sector, with subtotals for labour, equipment and consumables. Lines can carry cost centre, method, equipment serial, technician, rate type and days or hours. That means recharged expenses land on an invoice your client’s accounts department can actually match to their PO. You can read more on the Invoicing app page.

What you get in practice is fewer rechargeable costs quietly written off, and fewer awkward calls asking a client to add something to an invoice they’ve already paid.

Per diems, mileage and rotation allowances

In most inspection companies, per diems cause more expense noise than anything else. Technicians away from home for a shutdown, a pipeline spread or a fabrication yard audit get a daily allowance, and the rules differ by client, by country and sometimes by site.

Set up properly in Expenses, per diems become boring, which is what you want:

• A per diem category with a fixed unit cost. The technician enters the number of days and the amount works itself out.
• Separate categories where rates differ, for example domestic versus international, or a client-specified subsistence rate that you recharge at a sales price.
• A mileage category with a unit cost per distance, used by technicians who drive personal vehicles to site.

The supervisor’s check is simple: do the per diem days match the days the technician was actually on the job? Timesheets in the ERP record work type (inspection, travel, standby, setup), site and client for each day, so the approver has something to compare against instead of relying on memory. If a technician logged five days of site timesheets and claimed seven days of per diem, the gap is easy to spot.

Where company vehicles are used, the ERP’s Fleet app tracks vehicle assignments to projects and drivers, with dates and mileage. That makes it easy to spot a fuel claim for a vehicle that was assigned to someone else that week. We agree with you during setup which vehicle costs go through Expenses and which are paid centrally.

How you treat per diems for tax and payroll depends on your country, and your accountant sets that up with us during implementation. Expenses records and approves the claim. The accounting treatment follows your local rules.

Who uses Expenses in an NDT company

Access rights are set per role. A technician sees their own expenses, a supervisor sees their team’s, and accounts sees everything. During setup you decide whether supervisors can see only the jobs they run or all jobs.

In smaller NDT companies it’s common for the owner to be the approver and the accountant as well. That’s fine. The app works the same with one approver as with fifty, and the job links still pay off when it’s time to invoice.

For larger companies with several branches or bases, expenses can be split by department or cost centre as well as by job. That way each base manager sees their own field spend and the owner still gets the full picture.

How Expenses connects to the rest of Atlantis NDT ERP

Expenses is useful on its own. Connected to the rest of the ERP, it answers the question every NDT owner asks at month end: did this job make money?

• Project. NDT jobs in the Project app carry job type, site, client PO, methods, codes, and the assigned technicians and equipment. Expenses linked to the job sit alongside the labour and equipment costs.
• Timesheets. Hours by work type, method and site give approvers something to check per diem and travel claims against, and they feed billing.
• Team Assignments. Mobilisation and demobilisation dates on each assignment tell you when a technician should have been travelling or on site.
• Invoicing. Rechargeable expenses land on the sales order and then the invoice. The financial dashboard shows revenue, cost of sales, gross margin, operating expenses, EBITDA, outstanding invoices, bills and expenses over a 12-month view.
• Purchase and Inventory. Planned purchases of consumables and equipment go through Purchase, and Expenses covers the unplanned buy on site. Keeping the two separate stops your consumables stock from drifting.
• Employees. Every expense belongs to an employee record, the same record that holds the technician’s NDT profile. See the Employees app.
• NDT Reports. The inspection report for the job lives in the same database. If you also use Atlantis’s companion Digital Twin Reporting Software, the results can be placed on a 3D model of the asset, so the whole job, from travel costs to findings, is traceable.

Because it’s one database, there’s nothing to export, nothing to re-key and no second system to reconcile. The job number the technician picks for a receipt is the same job number on the report, the timesheet and the invoice.

For the full list of what’s included, see the Atlantis NDT ERP apps overview or the main NDT ERP page.

What implementation looks like

Expenses is one of the quicker apps to set up, but the setup decisions matter. Atlantis NDT deploys and configures the ERP for you. For Expenses we work through:

1. Your expense policy. What technicians can claim, the per diem rules, mileage, lodging limits and what needs a receipt. If you don’t have a written policy, we help you write down the one you already use informally.
2. Categories and accounts. A category list that matches your field spend, each mapped to the right expense account, with taxes set up for your country.
3. Re-invoicing rules. Which categories recharge at cost, which at a sales price and which never. Contract-specific exceptions are handled per job.
4. Approvers. Who approves for whom, and what happens when a supervisor is on leave.
5. Reimbursement method. Bank payment, payroll, or both, plus how company cards are handled if you issue them.
6. Mobile setup. Getting technicians logged in on their phones and, if you want one, an email alias for forwarding receipts.
7. Training. A short walkthrough for technicians (it takes minutes) and a longer one for approvers and accounts.

Anything beyond standard Expenses, such as a specific approval rule or a report layout your client insists on, gets scoped with you and configured as part of the customization agreed at the start. The ERP is built to be affordable for NDT companies of any size, and pricing is quote on request.

Want to see it with your own expense categories? Book an Expenses demo and we’ll take a real field trip from receipt to invoice.

Frequently asked questions

Can technicians submit expenses from their phones?

Yes. Technicians use the ERP in a phone browser to create expense lines, attach receipt photos and submit reports. We can also set up a receipt email alias, so forwarding a receipt creates an expense.

Can expenses be re-billed to the client automatically?

Yes, if the expense is linked to a sales order. Each category is set to not re-invoice, to re-invoice at cost, or to re-invoice at a sales price. Approved rechargeable expenses appear on the sales order ready for invoicing.

How do you handle per diems?

With a fixed-cost expense category. The technician enters the number of days and the amount is calculated for them. Separate categories cover different rates, such as domestic, international or client-specific.

Does Expenses work offline on remote sites?

No, Expenses needs a connection. The offline field app in Atlantis NDT ERP is for inspection reports. Technicians photograph receipts on site and log them once they have signal, usually the same evening.

Can we record expenses in other currencies?

Yes. Atlantis ERP supports multiple currencies, so a technician working abroad can record an expense in the local currency and it converts for accounting. We set up currencies and rates during implementation.

Who approves expenses?

Whoever you set as the employee’s expense manager, usually the crew supervisor or project manager. Accounts then posts and pays. Every step is logged with a name and time.

Is Expenses included in Atlantis NDT ERP?

Yes. It’s one of the standard apps we set up for NDT companies. Pricing for the ERP is quote on request.

Stop losing field costs between the site and the invoice

If recharging costs depends on someone remembering to hand in an envelope, some of them are probably being written off. Expenses in Atlantis NDT ERP keeps the receipt, the job and the approval in one place, and moves the rechargeable part onto the invoice.

Tell us how your crews travel and spend today, and we’ll show you how it would run in your ERP. Request a quote for Atlantis NDT ERP, or ask for a demo that covers Timesheets and Invoicing too.

Works with

• Invoicing: Invoices from timesheets and completed jobs, with payments and reminders.
• Purchase: Purchase orders for consumables, film, couplant and equipment.
• Inventory: Stock of consumables, sources and equipment across sites.

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