Expense Assistant - Alignment with Corporate Card Dates

[leebown]

Hi,

Does anybody know how Expense Assistant allocates Corporate Card expenses to monthly claims ? 

Our statement period is not quite a calendar month e.g. 31st July - 29th August.

What would happen with a imported Corporate Card Expense dated 31st July?  Concur knows the transaction has a billing date of 29th August but does Expense Assistant allocate it to the July claim or the August claim? 

Thanks in advance,
Lee

[KevinD]

I believe the transaction would be added to the expense claim for July. As far as I understand it, the transaction date is what Expense Assistant uses to add card charges to claims. 

I'd be curious to hear what other people's experience is with this situation. 

[leebown]

Hi Kevin,

I found an article in the Support Portal which confirmed that "when Expense Assistant assigns card transactions to a report, it utilizes the Transaction Date by design."

There is already a Solution Suggestion to enhance.

Regards,
Lee

[DeanR]

As you've discovered, it is assigned to a monthly report based on Transaction Date.  If your billing cycle is not a calendar month (and most aren't) then you end up with multiple Expense Assistant-created reports for each billing period, requiring manual transfer of expenses and deletion of the superfluous report.  None of our corporate card holders (which would be >90% of our Concur transactions) use Expense Assistant for this reason and I fully support any Solution Suggestion to enable it to align with the card billing cycle.

[Jenny]

Our credit card statement period is not based calendar month either, so we asked our users to turn off expense assisant.  If you go to the Expense Tab, View Transactions, you should be able to filter Time Period dropdown to the Current Statement period.  This is what we recommend our users to select and move transactions to a report from there, which aligns with credit card statements.  We did find one credit card company import that caused the statement period to not work properly, but we contacted them and they fixed it. 

It would be best if we could tell Expense Assistant to align with our statement periods.

[mfabre]

Hi all - bringing this topic up again because Concur release notes mention that expense assist will allow to set the dates for monthly reports.  the problem is that there are a few charges on the statement close date that may /may not be on the statement.  does anyone know why concur doesn't use the statement date in the card transactions from the line item to correctly pull the charges into reports?

[KevinD]

@mfabre my guess... and that is purely what I'm doing, is that most companies like to have users submit reports on a monthly basis. If Expense Assistant used the statement period, then users would have two reports created and then need to move expenses from one report to the other as the statement would span two different months. 

[mfabre]

we only submit one report per month, but we use the statement period and pay to the billing cycle.  we do this by creating the report from the current transactions, then choose the billing statement cycle and creating the full report.  this has reduced our late fees by thousands of $$.  i was hoping this solution would allow us to use expense assist with the statement cycle to submit one report per month (which keeps the cost down, when paying corp cards )..does anyone have a work around that pays the statement balance on a monthly basis within concur?