Submitting a referee expense claim
How a referee files a claim for one tournament — match fees, driving, travel, accommodation and other costs with receipts — how the total is worked out, what happens after it is sent, and how an organiser switches expense claims on and sets the rates.
Looking for something else? Appointing referees across a series Referee costs: fees, claims and paying the referees
When a tournament has switched on expense claims, referees file their own claim in Profixio instead of handing in a paper form or emailing the organiser.
One claim covers everything for one tournament: the fees for the matches you refereed (Profixio calculates those for you), driving, other travel, accommodation, and any other costs — with a receipt for each cost you type in yourself.
You file one claim per tournament, not one per match. You keep editing that same claim, saving it as a draft as often as you like, until you send it.
When you send it, the claim goes to the tournament's referee coordinator, who approves it or sends it back to you with a reason. In most tournaments it then goes on to a finance reviewer before it is paid.
Expense claims are off by default and have to be switched on per tournament. In a tournament that has not switched them on, referees have no claim form at all.
There are none in the software. The claim form, the settings and the approval chain are identical for every sport and every federation — Profixio does not branch on either here.
What differs is policy, and Profixio does not enforce it:
- The rate per kilometre, the passenger addition and the accommodation rates are amounts the organiser types in. Profixio does not check them against any federation's tariff.
- Match fees per category and referee type are likewise the organiser's numbers.
- Any deadline for handing in a claim is the organiser's own rule. There is no deadline in the system, and a late claim is not blocked or flagged.
- Whether a finance reviewer must see the claim is a per-tournament setting, not a federation rule.
So two tournaments in the same federation can pay different rates without anything in Profixio objecting.
- Reviewing, approving, rejecting, paying and exporting claims — the referee coordinator's and the finance reviewer's side, including the export to the accounting system and invoicing the club. See Reviewing and paying referee claims.
- Being appointed to matches in a series, nominations and acceptances. See Appointing referees across a series.
- Signing up as a referee for a tournament, and the settings that open or close that sign-up. See Referee registration for a tournament.
- The referee's own pages — assigned matches, availability, contact details, anonymity and the calendar feed. See The referee's own pages.
For other roles
You can file a claim when all of this is true:
- The tournament has switched expense claims on. If it has not, you get a message that expense claims are not enabled for this tournament and are sent back to your referee page.
- You are registered as a referee in that tournament, and you are signed in with the email address you registered with as a referee. Registration is per tournament — being a referee in one tournament gives you nothing in another.
Two things that are not required:
- You do not need assigned matches. If you have none, the Matches step of the claim simply says "No matches assigned yet" and you can carry on. Your match fees are then zero and the claim covers only your own costs.
- There is no deadline in Profixio. No date closes the claim form. An organiser may still have a deadline as a rule of their own — Profixio does not enforce it and will not warn you.
Two special cases:
- You were removed from the tournament's referee list. You keep access to the claim as long as you still have matches you worked in that tournament, because those matches still have to be paid. A removed referee with no matches loses access.
- You already have a claim. There is only one per tournament, so asking for a new one just opens the existing one.
Open your referee page for the tournament. The Expense Claim card there has a Create expense claim button until you have a claim, then Continue editing while it is a draft and Edit and resubmit if it has been rejected. Once the claim has been sent and is no longer with you, the card offers only View details. The claim itself is a wizard you move through with Next and Back; Save Draft keeps what you have without sending it.
Which steps you see depends on what the tournament has enabled and on your own answers, but the order is always the same:
- Info — Full Name, Address and Bank Account (all required), your read-only Referee Number, and the switch Had access to a car ("Used for driving expense calculations").
- Matches — read-only. Your matches and the fee for each, with the note "Match fees are auto-calculated from Profixio". Nothing to fill in.
- Driving — only if the tournament allows driving expenses and you switched Had access to a car on.
- Travel — travel you paid for, and accommodation, on one step.
- Other — free-text expense lines, plus a Comments box.
- Review — everything summed up, with the Grand Total and the buttons that send the claim.
Watch out on the first step: Full Name and Address are shown so you can check them, but changing them there does not update your referee details — the edit is lost. Only the Bank Account is saved back to your referee record. If your name or address is wrong, correct it on your referee registration instead.
Driving (your own car). Fill in one block per trip: From, To, Kilometers, Passengers, Date, and Passenger names — names become required as soon as you put in one passenger or more. Add another trip adds a block. You never type an amount here: the step shows the tournament's rate ("Mileage reimbursement at … /km", plus a per-passenger addition per km) and calculates the sum for you.
Travel (journeys you paid for). One block per journey: pick a Method — Flight, Train, Bus, Boat / Ferry, Taxi or Other — then From, To, Amount, Date and a receipt. Add travel expense adds a block.
Accommodation sits on the same step. Choose one of Cup Care, Own Accommodation or Didn't stay overnight. If you choose one of the first two, fill in Number of Nights, Date From and Date To; the amount is the tournament's rate per night for that choice multiplied by the nights. If the organiser has not set a rate for the option you pick, it counts as zero.
Other Expenses. One block per cost: Description, Amount and a receipt. Add expense adds a block. The Comments box at the bottom of the step is for anything the coordinator should know; it follows the claim.
Amounts you enter must be zero or more — you cannot type a negative amount. Only the referee coordinator can put a deduction on your claim.
A receipt is required on every travel line and every other-expense line. The field says "Required. PDF, JPG or PNG." You cannot move past that step without one. Driving and accommodation lines have no receipt field — they are calculated from the tournament's rates, not from what you paid.
- File types: PDF, JPG or PNG. Anything else is refused with "A receipt has to be a PDF, JPG or PNG file."
- Size: at most 16 MB per receipt. A photo straight from a phone camera is shrunk in the browser before it is uploaded, so it normally fits and uploads quickly.
- One receipt per line. To swap one, pick another file on the same line — the field then says "Replace existing receipt." There is no separate delete button; deleting the whole expense line removes its receipt with it.
Receipts are stored centrally, and are appended to the PDF that the referee coordinator and the finance reviewer download, so a claim they open shows your receipts as extra pages.
The Grand Total on the review step is the sum of five parts:
| Part | Where the amount comes from |
|---|---|
| Match fees | The tournament's own fee table, per match category and per referee type. Read-only for the referee. |
| Driving | Kilometres × the tournament's rate per km, plus passengers × kilometres × the per-passenger rate per km. |
| Travel | The amounts you typed on the travel lines. |
| Accommodation | Nights × the tournament's rate per night for the option you chose. |
| Other | The amounts you typed on the other-expense lines. |
Each step shows its own subtotal and the running Grand Total, updated as you type.
There is no VAT or tax handling anywhere in the claim: the amounts are plain sums.
Do not add your match fees as an "other" expense line. They are already counted from the match list, and an extra line for them makes the claim pay twice.
The referee cannot override the total — it is recalculated on the server every time the claim is saved, so what is stored is always the sum of the lines that actually exist.
On the Review step, check the summary and press Submit for Approval ("By submitting, you confirm all information is correct"). You can also send a saved draft from the My Expenses page with Submit, or go back into it with Continue Editing.
Once submitted the claim is read-only for you. There is no withdraw button — if you sent it too early, ask the referee coordinator to send it back to you.
The status is shown on My Expenses and on your referee page:
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Draft | Not sent. Only you can see it. |
| Submitted - Pending Review | With the referee coordinator. |
| Rejected | Sent back to you with a reason. You can edit and resubmit. |
| Approved - Pending Finance Review | The coordinator approved it; the finance reviewer has it. |
| Approved - Awaiting Payment | Approved all the way; waiting to be paid out. |
| Under Review | Back with the coordinator. Nothing for you to do. |
| Paid | Paid, or sent to the organiser's accounting system. |
Your referee page also shows a short progress line — Submitted → In review → Approved, where the last step becomes Paid once it has been paid.
If the tournament does not require a separate finance review, the coordinator's approval takes the claim straight to Approved - Awaiting Payment.
When the referee coordinator rejects a claim, you get an email with the reason and a link straight back to the claim. In the app you will see:
- a red Rejected badge on the claim and a Rejection Reason box with the coordinator's message,
- an Expense claim rejected notice on your referee page with an Edit and resubmit button.
Open the claim, change what the coordinator asked for, and press Resubmit for Approval on the review step (or Edit & Resubmit from My Expenses). The claim goes back to the coordinator; the old rejection reason is cleared.
If the finance reviewer sends the claim back instead, it goes to the referee coordinator, not to you. You will see the claim as Under Review rather than as rejected, and you do not have to do anything — that is intentional, not a display error.
The referee coordinator can reduce a claim before approving it by adding a deduction line — a line with a negative amount — instead of rejecting the whole claim over one item.
In your claim a deduction shows as a grey block marked "Adjustment made by the referee coordinator". You can see it, but you cannot edit it, shrink it or delete it, and it is included in your Grand Total. It also carries no receipt requirement.
If you disagree with a deduction, talk to the coordinator — it can only be changed from their side, and only while the claim is still waiting for approval. Adjustments are not made after a claim has been approved.
Everything on the organiser side lives under the tournament's Referee → Referee Costs page. Two buttons in the header of that page open the configuration:
- Expense Settings — turns the claim system on and sets the rates.
- Setup Costs — the match fee table (see Match fees per category and referee type).
You need the tournament's referee-costs or economy permission to reach the page at all; without it the menu entry is not shown and opening the address directly gives an error.
Expense claims are off for every new tournament. Until someone opens Expense Settings and switches Enable Expense Claims on, referees in that tournament have no claim form and no Expense Claim card on their referee page. Switching it off again does more than hide the referee's form: the coordinator's review, approve, reject, bulk and send-to-economy actions on the Referee Costs page disappear with it, and so does the claim status column. Claims already filed are not deleted, but the normal tools for handling them are gone until the setting is switched back on — so do not turn it off to "close" a tournament that still has claims waiting.
Set the rates before you tell referees to file. A rate you leave empty is treated as zero, so an accommodation option with no rate pays 0.
All of these are on Expense Settings, reached from the tournament's Referee Costs page.
| Setting | What it does | Default | Also means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enable Expense Claims | The master switch. Referees only get a claim form when this is on. | Off | Off means referees see "expense claims are not enabled for this tournament". |
| Enable Driving Expenses | Allows claims for driving one's own car. | On | Off removes the whole Driving step from the referee's claim. |
| Enable Accommodation Expenses | Allows accommodation nights. | On | Off removes the accommodation choice from the travel step. |
| Enable Travel Expenses | Allows paid journeys (flight, train, bus, boat/ferry, taxi, other). | On | Off removes the travel blocks. With accommodation also off, the whole step disappears. |
| Enable Other Expenses | Allows free-text expense lines. | On | Off removes the Other step, including its Comments box. |
| Driving Rate per KM | Amount paid per kilometre driven. | 3.50 | Shown to the referee at the top of the driving step. |
| Driving Passenger Bonus per KM | Extra amount per kilometre for each passenger carried. | 0.50 | Multiplied by both passengers and kilometres. |
| Accommodation Cup Care Rate | Amount per night when the referee picks Cup Care. | empty | Empty pays nothing for that choice. |
| Accommodation Own Care Rate | Amount per night when the referee picks Own Accommodation. | empty | Empty pays nothing for that choice. |
| Require Finance Approval | Whether an approved claim needs a second approval from a finance reviewer before payment. | On | Off makes the referee coordinator's approval final — the claim jumps straight to Approved - Awaiting Payment. |
| Economy System Email | The address that approved claims are emailed to as a PDF invoice with the receipts attached. | empty | Empty hides the "send to the economy system" action for the whole tournament. |
Things people expect to find here and that do not exist:
- No deadline setting. Nothing closes the claim form on a date.
- No "receipt required above X" setting. A receipt is always required on travel and other-expense lines, and never asked for on driving and accommodation.
- No way to skip the coordinator. The referee coordinator always reviews. Only the finance step is optional.
- No per-referee or per-class exception to the rates. The rates are the same for everyone in the tournament.
The fees that appear on a referee's Matches step come from Setup Costs, on the tournament's Referee Costs page. This is a different table from the expense settings, and it is used even in tournaments that never switch expense claims on — it is the base fee for officiating.
Cost per Category is a grid: one row per match category in the tournament, one column per referee type. Type an amount into a cell to set what that referee type is paid for a match in that category; clearing the cell removes the fee again. Each cell saves on its own, with a short Cost updated confirmation.
Cost per Arena below it is a read-only overview for budgeting: per facility, the number of matches, one column per referee type, a Sum per facility and a Total row.
A category with no fee set pays nothing for those matches, and the referee's claim shows zero for them — a common cause of "my match fees are missing".
Work down the list and stop at the first match.
- Are expense claims switched on for this tournament? They are off by default. Check Referee → Referee Costs → Expense Settings → Enable Expense Claims. This is the most common cause.
- Is the referee signed in with the email address they registered with as a referee? If they sign in with another account, such as a private one, they will not see the claim.
- Are they registered as a referee in this tournament? Registration is per tournament and does not carry over from another one.
- Were they removed from the referee list? They keep the claim only if they still have matches in that tournament. With no matches, access is gone.
- Do they already have a claim? There is one per tournament — "create" opens the existing one, which can look like nothing happened.
- Has the claim already been submitted? It is then read-only until the coordinator sends it back. There is no withdraw.
- Is only one step missing? Driving needs both the tournament setting and the referee's own Had access to a car switch. Travel, Accommodation and Other each disappear when the matching setting is off.
- "No matches assigned yet" is not a blocker — the claim can be filed anyway, with zero match fees.
- Match fees showing as zero? No fee has been set for that match category and referee type in Setup Costs.
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