We have an issue where our staff often don’t assign a task to an expense and instead just assign it to a project. This adds to the total project budget, which is an issue for us. We need expenses to come out of the total project budget instead of adding to it. The only way for this to happen is if expenses are forced to require a task, like the setting for time entries.
Would it help if you completely remove the expenses from the budget by making sure the last option in the screenshot you have attached is not selected?