Report created on a personal policy in New Expensify becomes invisible in ND (visible only in Expensify Classic)

[s77rt]

BUG: Report created on a personal policy in New Expensify becomes invisible in ND (visible only in Expensify Classic)

Slack: https://expensify.slack.com/archives/C049HHMV9SM/p1785160474066519

Action Performed:

1.  In New Expensify, have expenses that are not on a group workspace.
2.  Select the expenses and click Create report.
3.  NewDot fires CreateAppReport → CreateReport → ChangeTransactionsReport, creating the report under the user's personal policy and moving the transactions into it.
4.  Look for the newly created report and its transactions in New Expensify. The report cannot be found, nor the expenses.

Expected Result:
The report the user just created (and the transactions moved into it) should be visible in New Expensify, the same place the user performed the action. Creating a report should never move expenses somewhere the app can't display.

Actual Result:
The report is created on the user's personal policy (policyType: personal), which has no policyExpenseChat for a report preview to live in. Because NewDot is chat-centric and surfaces expense reports as report-previews inside a workspace chat, it has nowhere to render a personal-policy report. The report (and the transactions moved into it) drop out of the LHN entirely and are not visible anywhere in New Expensify. The report is only viewable in Expensify Classic, which lists expense reports directly. From the user's perspective all their transactions "disappeared" after clicking Create report. This analysis was provided by Melvin.

Issue Owner

Current Issue Owner: @s77rt

Upwork Automation - Do Not Edit

• Upwork Job URL: https://www.upwork.com/jobs/~022082206491437687300
• Upwork Job ID: 2082206491437687300
• Last Price Increase: 2026-07-28

[MelvinBot]

Issue Analysis

Symptom mechanism (confirmed, App side): A personal-policy expense report has no policyExpenseChat to host a report preview, so NewDot — which surfaces expense reports as previews inside a workspace chat — has nowhere to anchor it, and the report + its moved transactions fall out of view. Only Classic, which lists expense reports directly, still shows them. This matches the reported behavior.

Likely root cause (Medium confidence — appears to be backend): The App's own "Create report" flow for unreported expenses should never pick a personal policy — so the personal-policy assignment most likely happens in the backend CreateAppReport handler when the App sends an empty policyID. That code lives outside this repo, so the fix requires an internal engineer with backend access; it can't be implemented in Expensify/App.

Investigation details & evidence

1. The App flow does not assign a personal policy. When you select unreported expenses and tap Create report, SearchTransactionsChangeReport.tsx resolves the target policy via usePolicyForMovingExpenses.ts:104-137. Only group policies are eligible (isGroupPolicy gate), and selectors/Policy.ts:23 strips a personal active policy to undefined. If the user has no eligible group workspace, the hook returns shouldNavigateToUpgradePath / shouldSelectPolicy and the App redirects to Upgrade / workspace-selection instead of creating a report.

2. So how does it land on a personal policy? createNewReport writes CREATE_APP_REPORT with policyID: policy?.id. In the managed-card path the App deliberately sends an empty policyID so the backend auto-selects a policy. If the backend resolves that empty/absent policyID to the owner's personal policy, the report is persisted on policyType: personal. This resolution is backend-side and not visible in this repo.

3. Why it then disappears in ND. buildNewReportOptimisticData only creates the REPORT_PREVIEW action if a parent policyExpenseChat exists. getPolicyExpenseChat returns undefined for a personal policy (personal policies have no expense chat), so no preview is created and buildOptimisticEmptyReport leaves chatReportID/parentReportID undefined and sets the participant notificationPreference to HIDDEN. The result is a standalone expense report with no chat host and no LHN anchor — invisible in NewDot's chat-centric UI, still listed in Classic.

Alternative explanation considered: a different creation entry point (e.g. Classic/OldDot, or the empty-report FAB) could produce the personal-policy report rather than the backend resolving an empty policyID. Either way the App "Create report" flow analyzed above does not assign a personal policy, so the origin is outside this frontend path.

To fully confirm which path assigns the personal policy, an internal engineer should inspect the CreateAppReport request payload/response in logs for a reproduction (which policyID the backend resolved when the App sent an empty one).

Recommended next step: Escalate to an internal engineer to fix the backend CreateAppReport policy resolution so it never places a report on a personal policy (or so the App/backend blocks report creation when no group policy applies, consistent with the existing Upgrade redirect). No App-repo code fix is appropriate here.

Possibly related: #96107 — admin unable to move a cardholder's unreported expenses to / create a report in New Expensify (overlapping "create report from unreported expenses" flow).

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Next Steps: This needs backend/internal follow-up (see above) — I can't implement a fix in Expensify/App. Reply with @MelvinBot <your feedback> to refine this analysis.

[melvin-bot]

Triggered auto assignment to Contributor-plus team member for initial proposal review - @ChavdaSachin (External)

[melvin-bot]

Job added to Upwork: https://www.upwork.com/jobs/~022082206491437687300

[s77rt]

Update: Raised PR.