Getting Started

This article will guide you through the basic settings you need to set up to easily configure Expense Manager and start using it.

After a successful installation of the Expense Manager component, you can follow these steps:

Configuring Expense Manager

1. Go to Expense Manager in the component manager of the backend and there, click the Optionsbutton to configure the extension

   

2. Inside the options, you will see 3 tabs of configuration. Let's go one by one:
   • General

     Inside the General tab, you can find the basic configuration of the component. First of all we have the currency symbol (before and after). We recommend for euro users to write '€' inside "after" and for dollar users to write '$' inside "before". This is just for formatting the amount fields of the application.

     The Date format field is used to configure the date depending on the region you live. The most common configurations are %Y-%m-%d and %d-%m-%Y

     The Default ItemId field is explained in a section below of this article due to its particular behaviour.

     Below the ItemId, we have the Amount with or without tax. By choosing Total, this means that the amount we introduce when creating an item already has the amount of tax applied. And choosing the Base option what we are saying is that the amount introduced needs to be added to the amount of tax of the item.
     For example:

     Consider an item of an amount of 100 and a tax of 20%. These are the fields we enter when creating a new item.
     If we have selected the Total configuration field the result item will be:

     • Base: 83,33
     • Tax: 20%
     • Value tax: 16,66
     • Total amount: 100

     But if we have selected the Base configuration field the result item will be:

     • Base: 100
     • Tax: 20%
     • Value tax: 20
     • Total amount: 120

     The next configuration parameter we can customize is the Display tax deductable. While set to Yes, we can see a column next to the tax column for each item containing a checkbox allowing users mark the items as tax deductable without entering the edit window.

     Display taxes and Display Account are used for showing or hiding their columns on the item list.

     In order to have all the fields visible for creating a new item without having to click on the more options button, we can enable the Always open more options field.

     By default, when the user is creating a new item, when he or she types a name for it, the system displays a list of the previous items created with a similar name. If the user clicks one of them, the new item fields will be filled with the information of the item clicked. To disable this, you can disable the option called New item suggestions

     When Show taxes related fields is active, the taxes fields of the new item form are visible and the user can fill them. In the description of the item, this fields will be visible too.

     Load Bootstrap must be set to Version 2 or Version 3 unless if you are sure that you load Bootstrap from another source.

     The Use bootstrap version field must be set according to the Load bootstrap field. If you set No on the previous field you will need to check the version of bootstrap that you know you are loading. Otherwise, select 2 or 3 according to what you have choosen in the Load bootstrap field.

     To set the number of default items per page we can change the Default items per page

     Accepted attachment extensions allows you to allow extra file types for expenses attachments. You can add the ones you want separated by coma.

     

     

   • E-mail Notifications

     This tab is used to configure the notifications for the Super User when a user creates or edits an item (Notify new items and notify items update options).

     We can set various receivers for the notifications. To do so, E-mails to notify should be filled with the emails separated by coma. For example:
     example1@example.com,example2@example.com

     Form (name) on emails is used to specify the sender's name and the From (email) on emails is used to specify the sender's email. If this field is left to blank, Joomla! will pick the administrator default email as default.

     The last two field allows us to specify the subject of the emails. The first one for the new item notifications and the sencond for the updates notifications.

     
   • Permissions

     In this section we can define what can users do depending on the group they belong to. For example, by default a guest can't do anything, a registered can create and delete items and the manager and administrator if we have the extended version of the component can filter items by user.

     

   Setting up the Menu Items to access Expense Manager in the frontend

   1. Go to Joomla's Menu Manager and create a new menu and then a new menu item or create a menu item inside an existing one. Then Select the Menu Item Type by pressing the button Select as shown in the image. Find the option Expense Manager, and you will see all the menu item types Expense Manager has to offer. Start by selecting Items View (MAIN VIEW)which is the component's main view. Give the menu item a name and hit Save. Your main Expense Manager page is now created an accessible from the front-end of your website.

      

   2. You can now create other menu items. You have available Add new account, Add new category and Add new item. They are not necessary because from the main view of the component we can create accounts categories and items but in some cases they could be useful.
   3. If you have created one of the three menu items above, we recommend to set them available to Registered users only in order to prevent unregistered users to add content.

      

   Setting up the Default Itemid parameter

   Now that we already have created the menu items, to finish the Getting Started section we are going to populate the Default ItemId parameter in the Expense Manager configuration.

   This field is used to assign the whole component to a specific menu item in Joomla, in a way that all the pages within Expense Manager will maintain the modules and all the rest of the settings set for that menu item. Even if you're not too familiar with Joomla and you don't fully understand what this means, we suggest you to configure it, as we explain here:

   1. Go to Joomla's Menu Manager and locate your main Expense Manager entry menu (which we previously set up). Take a look at this menu item ID and write it down.

      

   2. Now go to Expense Manager options, and on the General tab you will see a field called Default Itemid, which you probably leaved blank before. Now, type the number obtained in the previous point here, and hit Save.

      

   At this point we have our component up and ready to start using it.