Full expense deployment

  • 15 minutes

With Full expense deployment, you can use additional expense management capabilities through:

  • Support for project and non-project expenses.
  • Regional or global expense policies for each expense category.
  • Credit card integration.
  • Automated approval and posting workflows.
  • Receipt itemization.
  • Receipt capture/optical character recognition (OCR).

Define expense policies

You can define policies that your workers must follow when entering and submitting expense reports and travel requisitions. Implementing expense policies can help you manage expenses effectively.

For example, you can set a policy for hotel expenses in New York City, which states that the per-night expense can't exceed USD 250.00. If a worker submits an expense report or travel requisition where the room rate exceeds this amount, the system will notify the worker that the policy amount for the expense has been exceeded. You can configure the message that the worker will receive when you define the policy.

You can define three types of policies:

  • Warning - Allows the worker to submit an expense report or travel requisition, but the expense will be marked for all approvers and for later reporting.
  • Error - Requires the worker to revise the expense to comply with the policy before submitting the expense report or travel requisition.
  • Justification - Requires the worker or a manager to enter a justification for exceeding the policy amount before the expense report or travel requisition is submitted.

Policy tips

A few suggestions to help when you are creating new policies for expense management:

  • Policies are date effective, meaning that a policy won't take effect if it's created with a date after the date that the expense occurred. For example, you create a new policy today to enforce a maximum meal expense of USD 50.00. Any existing expenses that were entered as of yesterday won't be checked against this policy.

  • When creating a policy for an expense category that can be itemized, you should consider adding a condition for expense line type. Some policies, such as requiring a receipt, might not make sense for itemized lines. In this situation, the policy is applied only to the header line or a non-itemized line.

  • Expense management policies are evaluated against the source entity by default. For intercompany scenarios, you can set the policy to be evaluated against the destination entity (borrowing entity) instead. To run the policies against the destination entity, turn on the Evaluate expense management policy against borrowing legal entity feature in the Feature Management workspace.

For more information, see Expense report policies and per diem rules.

Import credit card transactions

Expense-related credit card transactions can be set up so that they are automatically imported on a recurring schedule. Alternatively, the transactions can be manually imported as they are required.

The credit card transactions are imported through the Credit card transactions data entity.

  1. On the Credit card transactions page, select Import transactions. If you’re opening data management for the first time, the system must update the list of data entities before you can continue.
  2. In the Name field, enter a unique description of the import job.
  3. In the Source data format field, select the format of the file that contains the credit card transactions to import.
  4. Select Upload and then find and select the file to import.
  5. After the file has been uploaded, validate the mapping of the credit card transaction file and the columns of the Credit card transactions data entity by selecting the View map link on the tile. If mapping errors occur, or if you must change the mapping, make the mapping changes from the Mapping visualization tab or the Mapping details tab.
  6. To automate the credit card transactions, select Create recurring data job. Then, you can set the recurrence that defines how often credit card transactions should be imported.
  7. When you’ve finished, select OK.
  8. To import the selected file now, select Import.
  9. If errors occur during the import, you can view the execution log or staging data to see the errors that you must fix to help guarantee a successful import.

Set up workflows

A workflow represents a business process and defines how a document flows through the system. The workflow also indicates who must complete a task or approve a document.

The following workflow types are available:

  • Expense report auto approval - Approval workflows for expense reports.
  • Expense report auto posting - Automatic posting workflows for expense reports.
  • Expense line item - Approval workflows for line items on expense reports.
  • Expense line item auto posting - Automatic posting workflows for line items on expense reports.
  • Travel requisition - Approval workflows for travel requisitions.
  • Cash advance request - Approval workflows for cash advance requests.
  • VAT tax recovery - Approval workflows for the recovery of value-added tax (VAT).

For more information, see Expense management workflows.

Expense delegation

An expense delegate can create and manage expense reports for another employee.

To set up a user as an expense delegate, complete the following steps.

  1. Go to Expense management > Setup > General > Delegates.
  2. On the Delegates page, select New and then select the employee who will have a delegate defined.
  3. Enter the alias of the delegate user, and then enter the start and end date for the delegation period.

If the feature management key Enable expense delegates list page is enabled, the Expenses delegated to me list page will be available. Go to Expense management > My expenses > Expenses delegated to me.

A delegate can quickly filter and search existing expense reports that have been delegated to them. The delegate can also quickly create a new expense report for other users by selecting New expense report.

Delegates can create and manage expense reports for other employees by going to Expense management > My expenses > Expense reports and selecting Open other user's expenses.

Receipt capture/ OCR

The OCR feature helps employees to auto create the manually entered expense transactions from receipts.

To use the receipt OCR feature, complete the following steps:

  1. Enable Expense reports re-imagined from Feature Management.
  2. Create an expense report.
  3. Add an expense line.
  4. Go to the Receipts tab.
  5. Select the receipt from your computer and then select Upload. After the receipt has uploaded, the receipt values are automatically extracted.
  6. You can create a new expense line from the receipt or match it to an existing expense line.

For more information and a demonstration video, see Expense receipt processing.