Attendees List

[Francesca]

Hello everyone,

I was wondering how you handle adding attendees to meal expenses. What works for your company and what has failed.

My company is thinking of adding the Concur directory feature and changing the group size of attendees from 25 to 5 or 10 and not requiring attendees names.

Would very much appreciate insight on what you are doing or what you like/don’t like.

Thank you,

[TrishW]

Hi there

We are just changing the attendee list feature for Entertainment.  The tax laws (FBT)  in Aus require that we have a name and the company, where they are a gustm employee or spouse as different portions of the tax rule are affteced by which type of attendee they are.

Hope this helps

Trish

[KevinD]

So, a little known feature available in Concur (which I believe is turned on by default) is using Outlook to create an attendee list. How it works is this: You create an Outlook meeting invite and send it to those who will be attending the group meal. After they have accepted, and they must accept the invite for this feature to work, you can open the meeting invite then use the Forward option in Outlook. You will then forward as iCalendar to receipts@concur.com. This will create a list of the attendees that will appear in your Available Expenses. I know there are other ways people get attendees added to reports, but if it is a larger group, this option may work well for you.

[Francesca]

Thank you so much KevinD.

I had no idea this feature was available wthin Concur. I will look into this feature for my company.

[mt7602]

Our company has been using the concur directory for about a year now.  Accounting and Payroll get reports for Meals and Entertainment. Payroll receives a weekly report on Gift Cards.  Both needed the employee id for company's employees and guest's company name.  

I created a rule to block business guests with our company name directing the user to use the directory when adding employees to the attendee list. 

In the past, employees will use the name they know for the employee which in many cases was not the proper legal name.  

The Outlook invite is used by many to automatically add attendees. 

[Francesca]

Hi KevinD,

I followed your steps but I never received the document under my available expenses.

Do you have any other suggestions?

[Francesca]

Hi KevinD,

I followed your steps but I never received the document under my available expenses.

Do you have any other suggestions?

[AmberLee]

Kevin's suggestion is my original go-to and if it's not working for you make sure your email is verified in Concur. If you're trying to do it on your phone make sure the email in your Concur matches the email you have set up on your phone.
If you're a delegate and you want to add attendees for someone else you must be listed as their delegate, both emails must be verified, and their email goes in the subject line.

Another option is through the Concur app. When you're in the expense report on the expense line that requires attendees, click the plus sign (+) on the top right. It will give you 4 options, the first two of which are the best IMO. The first is "add attendees from Outlook Calendar". After you click it a date field will pop up. Put in the date of the expense and if it's on your Outlook calendar it will show up there. Click it and add attendees to the expense. Voila!

[AmberLee]

Continuing from my last reply:
Option 2 is "Add from contacts" which is super cool if your phone saves contacts for you automatically. If so then you just choose attendees from your phone contacts and it populates all the fields for you.

3rd is Add manually
4th is Search

The first two are way cooler. 😎

[AmberLee]

Sorry for bombarding you with multiple responses but I'd like to end by answering your specific questions.

Attendees are a PITA but a necessary one. The main reason behind them is our old friend Uncle Sam. Allowable vs unallowable is a very fine line that changes based on seemingly minute differences like title. Employees, nonemployees, government employees, dignitaries, physicians, and any combination of these are all taxed different. Your company can write-off 100% of expenses with a certain type of attendee, 50% for others or 0%. When you consider how much is spent on meals and entertainment and the taxes associated with those, you're looking at some major savings. Plus, IRS audit...

Kevin, correct me if I'm wrong but every profile, active and inactive, will show up in the attendee search in addition to any attendee manually created by anyone at anytime from your company so using an official directory might be redundant.

Not sure what you mean by limiting the # from 25 to 5? I would never put a limit on an unknown variable.

Finally, if you aren't using the attendee feature correctly you can't pull awesome reports like this:

Duplicate Meal Attendees Report

The Duplicate Meal Attendees Report, located in the Intelligence Fraud folder, identifies expenses where the same person is claimed as an attendee on two different expense items on the same day. Once you identify a duplicate attendee, you should investigate why this occurred. There are cases where this could be a legitimate situation where the same person is taken out to multiple meals. However, this could be fraudulent if two different employees claim the same person as an attendee for the same meal. In that case, you have an opportunity to collect spend that is not a legitimate business expense.