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.
Please 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) - This rule 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 - If no receipt is present, you can choose which tax rate must be chosen in order to submit the expense. 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 - This rule will ask users to attach a receipt to all purchase expenses. In the example above, a user will be warned with a policy issue if submitting an expense without a receipt. We'd strongly recommend against introducing a Block on 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. We'd recommend only using Warn here as true duplicates often happen. For example, 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 - With the example shown above, this rule will block users from submitting an expense, if the expense date is in the future.
Expenses from the same card statement must be submitted together - This rule will ensure users submit expenses that are on the same statement at the same time. This will help manage any approval notifications and also ensure that expenses are reconciled with statement transactions at the same time. We strongly recommend having this rule set to Block for all company card users.
Company card expenses must be associated with a statement or data feed - This rule will prevent 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. To ensure your users' company card expenses are reconciled, and to prevent duplicate expenses being submitted, we strongly recommend this rule is set to Block.
For more information on the policy rules, hover over the question marks.