This feature is currently in beta and might not be available to you yet.
What are hospitality expenses
Hospitality expenses are costs for meals, drinks, or events that a company pays to host participants in a professional context. This includes:
Business hospitality with externals – e.g. taking clients, suppliers, or business partners to lunch, dinner, or an event.
Internal team hospitality – e.g. shared team lunches, dinners, or offsite meals that serve a business purpose such as team building, celebrating project milestones, or company events.
In both cases, the expense must have a clear business connection and should always document who participated (names of external guests and/or internal colleagues) and what the purpose of the occasion was.
Hospitality expenses with Moss
Hospitality expenses often require additional details for compliance and reporting. With Moss, this process is straightforward: when submitting a receipt, employees are guided to provide the purpose, participants, and tip.
Moss’s Expense Coding Agent automatically detects hospitality expenses and matches participants to the receipt, ensuring accuracy from the start. Finance teams can then easily filter these expenses in "Card transactions" or "Reimbursements", and structured CSV exports provide data down to the participant level – ready for reporting, audits, or payroll.
Whether an expense is linked to a card payment or submitted as a reimbursement, Moss captures the right information at the moment of submission, giving Finance teams exactly what they need.
How it works
When you submit a receipt that Moss identifies as a hospitality expense, you’ll be prompted to provide:
Purpose – a short description of the hospitality event (e.g. business lunch, team dinner, client meeting)
Internal participants (mandatory) – who from your company attended. You can either select an existing Moss user or enter a colleague’s name manually if they don’t have a Moss account. If names appear on the receipt, Moss will automatically try to match them to users.
External participants (optional) – the names of guests from outside the company.
Tip amount – if a tip was included on the receipt
If Moss does not automatically detect a hospitality expense, you can also manually mark the expense as hospitality.
Important: With Moss’s Expense Coding Agent, you unlock automatic detection of hospitality expenses and participant name matching – helping your team save time and reduce manual work. If your company hasn’t activated the Expense Coding Agent yet, your Customer Success Manager can guide you through the benefits – or you can reach us at support@getmoss.com.
Filtering Hospitality Expenses
Moss makes it easy to identify hospitality expenses in both the Cards transactions and Reimbursements expenses tables.
To do this:
Open the “All Filters” menu.
Select “Marked as Hospitality”.
Define the time period you want to review.
Click “Save” to apply the filter.
This view shows only expenses marked as hospitality, making them easy to identify without opening each transaction individually.
Exporting Hospitality Expenses
Finance teams can export hospitality expenses in CSV format for reporting, audits, or payroll analysis.
To download the export:
Go to “Cards transactions” or “Reimbursements” table.
Open the “All Filters” menu, select “Marked as Hospitality”, and set the time period you want to cover.
Choose the format “Hospitality Expenses CSV” (EN) or “Bewirtungskosten CSV” (DE).
Click “Start download” to generate the file.
CSV File Structure
Each line in the export represents one participant in an expense. For example, if an expense involves five participants, the export will include five lines for that expense.
Column | Description |
Expense ID | Unique Moss ID for the expense (unique identifier of an expense, which can be found in the URL) |
Expense Type | Card transaction or Reimbursement |
Merchant / Expense Name | Merchant name or expense description |
Submitter | Person who submitted the expense |
Date | Date of the expense |
Currency | Currency of the expense |
Total Amount | Full expense amount including tip |
Tip | Tip amount (if provided) |
Total Participants | Number of participants listed |
Participants | Name of the participant represented on this line |
Amount per participant (excl. tip) | Expense amount split evenly across participants, excluding tip |
Internal / External | Whether the participant is internal (employee) or external (guest) |
Share of internals | Share of internal participants in this expense |
Share of externals | Share of external participants in this expense |
Purpose | Declared purpose of the hospitality event |
Expense link | Direct link to the expense in Moss |
This structure enables Finance teams to:
Build pivot tables to summarize per-participant costs, tips, and total spend.
Compare internal vs. external participation to assess the nature of events.
Consistently review and report on hospitality expenses across the organization.
Note: The deductibility of hospitality expenses depends on local tax regulations. Moss provides structured data, but the Finance teams should confirm the correct treatment with their tax advisors.
How this helps finance teams
Moss delivers end-to-end support for hospitality expenses across every stage:
Submission – Spenders are guided through structured input flows, ensuring complete and compliant data entry.
Visibility – Hospitality expenses are easily discoverable through filters.
Auditability – All changes to hospitality expenses are logged, providing a clear audit trail.
Reporting – Structured data can be exported via CSV, enabling accurate reporting and analysis.
With Moss, hospitality expenses are both easy for employees to submit and simple for Finance teams to review, audit, and report on, ensuring compliance while reducing manual effort.