Introduction

The Expenses application supports the submission, management and approval of employee or client project expenses.

Along with the number of receipts uploaded, the date in which the expense was last modified and the total amount are retrievable. Previous expense sheets can also be duplicated to reduce time wastage in submitting regular expense claims.

Configurable settings on the administrative side allows customisation of the application to best suit your business needs, utilising a built in workflow, reporting and notification capabilities.

More information is available on how to submit an expense and the approval process, as well as how to configure the administrative side of the application.

Drag & Drop Receipt Upload

When intranet users are submitting expense claims for approval, they can add multiple receipts. These can be uploaded directly from the desktop using the built in drag & drop functionality. Employees can also add comments in the Notes section to provide further information to those responsible for the approval process.

Create Expense Types & Cost Codes

Expense administrators can configure various types of expenses that are applicable to your organisation. These may cover elements such as: accomodation, food, stationary, IT equipment and travel by: rail, bus, plane. There is scope to add as many expense types as required to encompass your business purposes.

Cost codes can also be configured to relate to these expense types. This allows efficient management and approval of each expense by those in charge of accounting. Cost codes and expense types can be used as a filter to generate specific reports on these aspects for your records or analysis.

Expense types and cost codes that are no longer valid can be hidden and not selectable when submitting an expense. Historical data for these disabled types is still maintained though for use in reports.

Operational Expenses & Client Projects

Intranet users can submit operational expenses that are associated with their job role, giving this an appropriate 'sheet name'. The area at the top of the page is where details about who they are, which location they work in and what department they work for is entered. In this example IT equipment was purchased. The information related to this purchase has been entered into the 'operational cost' area and a supporting receipt attached. Once submitted this expense sheet will appear in the users 'My Expenses' area.

Simultaneously, expense administrators can add various projects to the Expense application to assist with the recording and billing of costs associated with clients. Each project relates to a client organisation that is unique to your business, so is entered into the application as a custom configuration; each client organisation can have multiple projects.

When it comes to submitting an expense for a project, the 'project cost' section of the expense sheet can be filled out. The  client chosen in the expense sheet instructs the application to list the projects created for that client as options to choose from and attribute the expense to.

Once an expense has been added to the sheet using the 'save' button (regardless of whether for a project or operations) more entries can be added underneath and the total given at the bottom of the screen will reflect any additions.

This means one expense sheet could hold multiple expenses of different types and cost codes to encompass a whole external work trip an employee has undertaken or a whole/majority of a client project.

Departmental Expenses and Budget Holders

Departments and project teams can be added to the Expense application to reflect the exact structure of your organisation. When adding a department or project team you can assign both a main and substitute budget holder to ensure that they receive relevant notifications when an expense is submitted within projects they are managing.

Expense types can be associated with departments and teams. For instance the expense type 'Website Maintenance' may only be applicable to the marketing department. In this example the expense for equipment repair/parts is being attributed to the manufacturing department. Multiple types can be added into the 'expense type' field per department to build up an associated list.

Overarching Workflow

There are 6 stages of the workflow within the Expenses application. Those with administrative permissions are able to move expense sheets through statuses. 

- Draft: Employees can select ‘draft’ mode before submitting the expense sheet

- Submitted: Expense sheet has been submitted to the chosen approver, who receives a notification

- Rejected: Expense sheet has been reviewed by the chosen approver and has been rejected

- Returned: Expense sheet has been reviewed by the chosen approver and has been returned back to the user to provide further information

- Approved: Expense sheet has been reviewed and approved by the chosen approver. Notification sent to finance administrator

- Processed: Expense sheet has been processed by the finance department/expense reimbursed

The submitter of an expense is only able to save their expense as a draft or as submitted. They will never see the status area at the bottom of the sheet, only the total will be given from their perspective.

Assign administrator permissions - Expenses Admin or Finance Team

Any group/role/user defined in the permissions admin tab is an 'Expenses admin'.

They can access the admin side of the application as well as edit or change the status of any expense sheet. They have all encompassing admin rights so can push a sheet to approved and processed if required.

Any group/role/user defined in the permissions finance tab is now in the 'Finance Team'.

They can move the status of the expense from approved to processed or returned only. Finance admin users will recieve a notification when an expense has been set to 'approved' so that they can interact with these sheets accordingly and only in this capacity. This is useful to set up if you have an accounting group/role in your Intranet and wish for these users to only need to interact with the end of the expense workflow and approve/reject the submitted financials.

Expenses Reporting

As a budget holder or departmental manager it is important to view a detailed summary of corporate expenses.The reporting side of the Expenses application is permissions based area that allows authorised employees to filter expenses according to date, user, department, office location, vendor, project, expense type, status, currency and cost code. This information can then be downloaded as a CSV file for futher analysis, to be stored or as a reference.

Manage Expenses

Akin to reports, this is the in-application management area for Expenses. This will allow for filtering of expenses in more restricted ways than reports as this information is primarily required to keep on top of all current expenses and the statuses they are in. This area is for administrators to access and handle submissions by moving expenses between statuses. It can be used for quick reference to check all expenses are being interacted with.

The management area does not allow information to be downloaded unless they are individual expense sheets, which can be in PDF or CSV format. This is because the reports area serves this purpose and the management area is for expense control.

In the example below the administrator has searched by certain statuses and by user, then by status only; entering a ticket that has been submitted and approving it.