ExpenseCloud Adds Expense Policies
Posted on 17. Jun, 2011 by Eric in News & Updates
If you didn’t notice in ExpenseCloud’s May 16h release (Version 3.0), we added a really cool feature to manage company expense policies. The goal was to give companies a very simple way to add, manage and enforce expense policies when users file an expense report. We also know the every company runs their business differently, so we needed to give administrators a customized way to add expense policies that matched the business’s needs.
So what is an expense policy?
Very simply put, an expense policy is a set of rules that conforms to the way companies expect their employees to submit an expense report. Easiest example is a “receipt being required for expenses over $25″. A complex example could be “don’t submit a project based expense without marking the billable field, attaching a receipt and filling in the client field”.
Throughout my career, company expense policies were always buried in a 20 page document title “Company Travel & Expense Policy”. Having a piece of paper state the companies expense policy were problematic for both the submitter and the approvers. The main reason is it’s very difficult to pick up on the mistakes or policy violations in a report without having some automation. Typically, an error or policy violations are identified when the report reaches the accounting dept. (who typically goes through the report with a fine tooth comb). When issues are found, the submitter (who has already spent a great deal of time creating the report and emailing it off) gets notified from accounting that they need to correct the issues and resubmit the report. Another week of try to get your money back!
Image as the submitter if you could have know upfront what was wrong with the report, only to fix the errors or explain why you went outside the company policy? Or as an approver, being able to view when a company expense policy was not met and possibly providing color into something you may have authorized. Maybe the excuse was legit – while the company expense policy states “no mileage over 200 miles allowed”, one of your employees had a good excuse to drive 300 miles. Maybe they asked ahead of time for permission and it just needs to be noted when the report gets approved.
So to control and manage company expense policies, we’ve added the ability for an administrator to set up the company policies and immediately have them published to every associated user account. To keep it simple, we added two sections: “basic company policies“and “advanced company policies“. In a matter of seconds, an expense policy can be created in our basic company policy section for the following rules:
* Requiring receipt by amount
* Allowed expense age
* Max expensable Amount
* Max mile reimbursable amount
* Cannot submit expenses with the category “unknown”
In our “advanced company policies” section,we kept the super simple feel to create rules for the employees to follow. We allow policies to be create by:
* Billable
* Reimbursable
* Project
* Client
* Category
* Miles
* Receipt
* Integration
* Attendee
* Note
* Amount
Here’s a simple example:
Anytime you are entering a billable expense, a receipt is required.
Here’s a more advanced example:
When the project is Dell, you must mark it billable, receipt should be attached, and amount cannot exceed $199.
We’ve included examples in our help section of advanced company policies for you to view. The post is open to discussion and we encourage others to share with our users how they have set up their expense policies using ExpenseCloud.
Your feedback is very important to us! If you have any suggestions how to improve this new feature or have any success stories (especially how it’s saving your company money!) we would like to know.
