VAT on Multiple Expenses

VAT on Multiple Expenses

Firstly, might I say I am based in Ireland, and I'm not an accountant, and therefore my understanding of procedures could be somewhat limited.

Scenario.
An employee pays for items throughout a month, and therefore their claim for expenses includes multiple items - some of the items are VAT deductible (eg, an IT product) and some are not (eg, a client lunch).

Discovery
The odd thing in ZBooks, is that whilst it seems possible to add a VAT rate to a one-off item of expense, it is not possible to add the VAT rates when adding bulk items - from looking at the forum questions, I think the problem is more that this feature is not a standard in ZBooks, which I find surprising. 

The solutions being offered is to create a separate one-off expense for each item, but this would take hours! 

I checked in ITEMS, but it does not seem possible to add a VAT rate if the item is a 'purchase'.

Question
I noticed in Purchases, multiple line items can be added with different VAT rates - so could a workaround be in creating a 'Purchase' instead of an 'Expense'? Or is there something that would make this bad accounting practice?? 

How have you overcome this problem?

Thanks for your participation :)