Expense Reimbursement Form for Nonprofits: Template and Sample

Expense reimbursements are easy to approve in the moment and hard to reconstruct later. A staff member buys supplies, a volunteer pays for mileage, or a board member covers a program cost. If the form is incomplete, your books can turn into a guessing game.

This guide gives you a practical expense reimbursement form sample for nonprofits, plus the approval workflow that keeps receipts, funds, and payments tied together.

Quick Answer: What Should an Expense Reimbursement Form Include?

An expense reimbursement form should include the requester's name, expense date, vendor, amount, purpose, fund or program, receipt, approval signature, payment method, and payment status. For nonprofits, the fund or program field matters because reimbursements often need to be charged to a grant, restricted fund, campaign, or department.

The best form is short enough for staff and volunteers to use, but detailed enough for your bookkeeper, board treasurer, and auditor to trust.

Nonprofit Expense Reimbursement Form Sample

You can build your form in a spreadsheet, PDF, or an accounting platform. The fields below cover the essentials.

Field	What to collect	Why it matters
Requester name	Staff, volunteer, or board member	Shows who should be paid
Request date	Date the form is submitted	Helps track approval timing
Expense date	Date the purchase happened	Keeps records in the right period
Vendor or payee	Store, supplier, or service provider	Supports the audit trail
Description	Plain-English reason for the expense	Helps reviewers understand the purpose
Amount	Total to reimburse	Drives payment and accounting records
Fund or program	Grant, campaign, department, or unrestricted fund	Protects restricted funds
Receipt attached	Yes or no	Confirms documentation is present
Approval	Signature or digital approval	Shows the expense was reviewed
Payment status	Pending, approved, paid, or rejected	Prevents duplicate payments

If you only add one nonprofit-specific field, make it fund or program. That one field helps connect the reimbursement to your fund accounting, board reports, and donor restrictions.

A Simple Reimbursement Workflow

A good form is only half the job. The workflow around the form determines whether reimbursements stay clean.

1. The requester submits the form with receipts.
2. A reviewer checks the purpose, amount, and fund.
3. The approver confirms the expense follows your policy.
4. The finance person records the reimbursement in accounting.
5. Payment is issued and marked as paid.
6. The receipt and approval record stay attached to the transaction.

This process does not need to feel heavy. For a small nonprofit, one reviewer and one approver may be enough. The key is that the requester should not approve their own reimbursement.

What Counts as a Reimbursable Expense?

Most nonprofits reimburse reasonable costs that support an approved program or operation. Common examples include:

• Program supplies
• Event materials
• Mileage or local travel
• Postage
• Meals for approved meetings
• Training or conference costs
• Background check fees
• Volunteer supplies

Your policy should also name expenses that are not reimbursable. That might include personal items, unapproved travel upgrades, missing receipts, late submissions, or purchases that should have gone through a vendor approval process.

For larger vendor payments, your vendor management process may be a better fit than a reimbursement form. Reimbursements are usually for people who personally paid a cost and need to be paid back.

How to Handle Restricted Funds

Restricted funds make reimbursement forms more important. If a volunteer buys supplies for a grant-funded program, the expense should reduce that grant's available balance. If the form does not ask for the fund or program, someone has to figure it out later.

That creates risk. The reimbursement may be posted to the wrong place, your grant report may be off, or your unrestricted cash may appear healthier than it really is.

A clean reimbursement form protects you by asking three questions early:

• What program or fund benefited from this purchase?
• Was the purchase allowed under that fund's rules?
• Is there enough remaining balance to cover it?

This is one reason reimbursements should connect to your accounting system, not live forever in email threads.

Expense Reimbursement Policy Checklist

Your form works better when it sits beside a short written policy. Keep the policy plain and practical.

Include:

• Who can request reimbursement
• Which expenses are allowed
• Which expenses require pre-approval
• Receipt requirements
• Submission deadline, such as 30 days
• Mileage rate, if you reimburse mileage
• Approval roles by dollar amount
• Payment timing
• How restricted funds are reviewed
• What happens when a request is incomplete

If your board has not approved a policy yet, start simple. The goal is not to create paperwork for its own sake. The goal is to make payment decisions consistent and easy to defend.

Spreadsheet vs. Connected Accounting

A spreadsheet can work when reimbursements are rare. It is familiar, free, and easy to customize. The problem is that spreadsheets do not automatically connect the request, receipt, fund, approval, and payment.

As your nonprofit grows, that missing connection costs time. Someone has to chase receipts, update payment status, enter the transaction again, and reconcile the bank account later.

In Alignmint, reimbursement records can support the same financial story as your other expenses. Receipts, approvals, payments, and fund assignments can stay connected so your reports do not depend on memory. That matters when you are preparing board packets, grant reports, or a year-end review.

For related accounting controls, see our guides to cash disbursement journals and nonprofit bookkeeping software.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

The most common mistake is paying the reimbursement before the documentation is complete. Once money leaves the account, it gets harder to collect missing details.

Other trouble spots include:

• Letting requesters approve their own expenses
• Accepting vague descriptions like "supplies"
• Forgetting to assign a fund or program
• Reimbursing without a receipt
• Paying the same request twice
• Waiting until year-end to clean up records

None of these mistakes require bad intent. They usually happen because the process depends on email, memory, and scattered files.

Bottom Line

A nonprofit expense reimbursement form should make the right behavior easy. It should tell your team what to submit, tell your approver what to review, and tell your bookkeeper exactly where the expense belongs.

When reimbursements connect to fund accounting, you get cleaner books, stronger internal controls, and fewer year-end surprises.

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Related reading:

• Cash Disbursement Journals
• Nonprofit Vendor Management