When setting up your Expense Policy, you can impose policy rules for your users' purchase expenses. To do this, click the Expenses tab when creating or editing your policy.
Each policy rule has four options available: Off, Block, Warn or Report.
Off - The rule is not applied.
Block - Users cannot submit the expense.
Warn - The message should be reviewed and if it is OK, click on the Continue button to submit the expense. If not, click the Cancel button to go back and edit the expense.
Report - No warnings are displayed to the submitter, but are visible to the Approver and Finance users.
Note: We recommend only using a Block ruling when no exceptions to the rule can occur.
There are several policy rules we recommend implementing as best practice:
Maximum expense age (days) - the system checks the expense date when the expense is submitted. In the example above, if a user submits an expense 60 days or older, the user will be presented with a policy warning.
Missing receipt tax rate - set which tax rate must be selected to submit the expense if no receipt is present. In the example above, if a user submits an expense without a receipt, the expense will be blocked from submission, unless the tax rate is 'Zero Rated (0%)'.
Expenses must have a receipt - requires users to attach a receipt to all purchase expenses. In the example above, the user will be presented with a policy warning if submitting an expense without a receipt.
Note: We recommend that 'Block' is not selected for this rule if your company has a company card purchase method, as your user will have already incurred the expense.
Duplicate expense detection - the system will flag a purchase expense as a duplicate if the value, merchant and expense date are the same.
Note: We recommend only selecting 'Warn' for this rule as true duplicates often happen, E.g. paying for parking in the same car park for the same amount of time, twice or more a day.
Expense date cannot be in the future - the system will flag expenses that have a date in the future. In the example above, this user will be blocked from submitting the future dated expense(s).
Expenses from the same card statement must be submitted together - requires that users submit expenses that are on the same statement at the same time. This helps to manage any approval notifications and also ensures that expenses are reconciled with statement transactions at the same time.
Note: We recommend setting this rule to 'Block' for all company card users.
Company card expenses must be associated with a statement or data feed - prevents users from submitting expenses which have the purchase method as company card, unless the expense has first been matched to a card statement or data feed transaction.
Note: We recommend setting this rule to 'Block' for all company card users to ensure their company card expenses are reconciled correctly, and to prevent duplicate expenses from being submitted.
For more information on the policy rules, hover over the red question marks.