Coaster

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What Coaster does

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Coaster runs employee expenses and reimbursement for one business. It is free and open source under the MIT licence, and you run it yourself: on your own computer to try it, then on your own Cloudflare account for your team.

How a claim moves

  1. Submitted. An employee starts a claim, adds each expense with its receipt photo or PDF, mileage or per diem, and submits it to their approving manager.
  2. Approved. The manager checks each expense and its receipt, and approves the claim, returns it for correction with a reason, or rejects it.
  3. Reimbursed. Finance gathers approved claims into a batch that has to add up to the cent, downloads the accounting file for the bookkeeper and the reimbursements file for the bank, pays from the bank, and records the payment in Coaster.

Coaster never moves money. It keeps the record of what was claimed, who decided, and what was paid.

Who does what

Role Sees and does
Employee Their own claims: start, add expenses, submit, correct and resubmit.
Manager Claims routed to them once submitted: approve, return or reject.
Finance Submitted claims, batches, the export files and recording payments.
Owner Everything above, plus the business settings, categories, people and the move-in kit.

One person can hold several roles. Every employee has one approving manager, and nobody decides their own claim.

What Coaster keeps

  • Every receipt's exact bytes, never deleted and always downloadable.
  • Every revision of a claim, every decision and every history line. A returned claim comes back as the next revision; the earlier one stays readable.
  • Policy exceptions (no receipt, over a category limit, possible duplicates) with the employee's explanation, on the claim, the batch and the accounting file.

Where to go next