Working with Travel & Expense

Travel & Expense reads the expense claims and card charges your people make and compares them with your expense policy. It works from the claims, receipts and card transactions in your Data Room and the policy lines you give it, and reports whatever falls outside the policy in dollars. This page is how to work with it from day to day.

What to put in the Data Room

Two kinds of document are sufficient to begin: a claims export from your expense tool, added as a PDF, and the receipts behind the claims. Neither is an agreement or an invoice, so they sit beside Contracts and Agreements and Invoices in the Data Room. The module's own Data Room tab lists them under Expense claims and Card transactions. One export with a few claims on it produces a first finding, because the limits and the deadline have defaults the module uses until you give your own.

Add the remaining documents as you have them, because each one allows another check to complete. A receipt lets the module confirm that a line above your receipt threshold, the amount above which a claim needs a receipt, has one that matches it. Card transactions let the duplicate check compare a claim with a card charge for the same amount, merchant and date, and let the category check read card spend too. An export that shows who approved each claim lets the approver check confirm that nobody approved their own. You do not need to write out your expense policy, because the module asks for one line of it at a time, when a check needs it.

Add documents with Add to Data Room, as PDFs. No Connection brings claims or card charges in today, so add each export when the claims are paid and it is examined the same way as the first. Open the module's Data Room tab to see the claims and card transactions it has drawn on, and to link a document it has not used yet. The Data Room explains where documents live and what each kind is for.

When it asks you a question

Travel & Expense asks you nothing when you add it, and it asks a question only when a check needs the answer. Until then it uses a sensible default and names it in the finding, so you can correct it when it matters. Five questions can arise: the most a person may spend on meals in a day, the most for a hotel night, what you pay per mile for driving (blank means the IRS rate), anything never allowed or always allowed, and how many days a claimant has to submit a claim after spending. An example of the fourth is no alcohol, or client entertainment exempt from the meal limit. Your receipt threshold and who may approve up to what amount are company-wide values it reads rather than asks for.

A question arrives as a needs-information finding in the Findings list, and as a card in Ask Ressura. Your answer becomes an entry in your Organisational context, with your name and the date on it, and the check runs again automatically. Every one of these answers is scoped to the module, so a limit you set applies to every claimant alike, never to one person.

How to read a finding

The module's Overview shows Outside policy, the sum in dollars of the claims and card spend in the period that fell outside your policy. That is spend over a limit, in a category you do not allow, claimed twice or submitted late. The claimant list sits beneath it, with what each claimant claimed, what fell outside policy and what has no receipt. Claimants are people, so members see a claimant id, and names show only to admins and the Owner, the roles Members and roles explains. Its Findings tab lists every finding: the claimant, the Control that produced it, its kind, the amount where there is one, the confidence, its disposition and the date. Choose Review finding to open one.

An exception says what was claimed, what your policy sets for that category, and the difference. Its provenance shows the claim line, the policy entry it was tested against with the date it took effect, and the receipt or card charge it was matched to. You can check the arithmetic yourself. When a finding leans on a default rather than a value you gave, it says so explicitly, and the module says what it found, never whether it was deliberate.

A needs-information finding names the document or the answer that would let a check finish: a missing receipt, an approver it cannot see, or a policy line it does not have. It never blocks the other checks. A fraud-risk finding comes from Fraud Watch and links the findings behind it. The Checks tab shows each of the eight Controls with its pass, exception and needs-information counts for the period.

How to disposition a finding

You answer a finding in one of three ways, and each answer is recorded with your name and the date. Accept an exception when the claim really was outside policy, such as a dinner over the daily meal limit, and add a note if you like. Reject it with the reason when the claim was right, such as a dinner that was client entertainment and exempt from the limit. The reason becomes a context entry, scoped to this finding, this claimant, this module or the whole company, so the same point is never raised twice. Answer a needs-information finding by adding the receipt it asks for or by typing the answer, such as who approved the claim, and the check runs again.

A claimant's own page, under Claimants, gathers their findings, their documents and their context entries in one place. It shows their department, their approver and their claims this period, and their name shows only to admins and the Owner. Findings and Dispositions has the rules every module shares, including the two-person rule for rejecting a fraud-risk finding.

What it costs

Running its checks, opening a finding and dispositioning one cost nothing, and checking the same documents again is free.

This page is the how-to. The Travel & Expense page says why it exists and what it checks.