Help: Ability to see summary coding (natural accounts) on individual expenses report

[Seanb]

Hi everyone.  First, I'm in a pre-sale mode, and we hit an obstacle getting info.  I like my sales team, but we are struggling to find a solution to something that should logically be there. 

We are only going to use Concur Expense to process and approve expense reports.  However, the payment and entry into our existing payable system would be manual.   

Our managers (approvers) and accounting processors need to see the summary coding of dollars to an account/GL (natural account).   We have 300 plus project accounts, so understanding the total amount for each account is important.  It appears that Concur does everything at an individual line or expense level (airfare, meals, car rental, etc.).  While the categories are nice to have, and our current manual process tracks them, when it comes to the accounting side, we use total dollars by natural account.    

Our goal was to save a PDF of the expense report and receipts and enter the summary coding in our payable system.  The expense report and receipt part were easy.  Apparently, the accounting side is more complicated and not obvious.   We prefer a summary of dollars and natural accounts to allow budget managers (approvers) see the total of that they are approving AND the accounting team (processors) to also see and verify the coding, but easily enter into the payable system.  For example, we may have one expense report with 50 lines that includes a trip that gets charged to multiple accounts (projects):

7450-002 (travel-department #1) - $1800

7450-602 (travel-conference#1) - $1500

7415-003 (office supplies-department #2) - $70

8280-602 (Reception-Conference #1) - $6000

We are being told there is nothing on the individual expense report that will summarize the coding.  The extract option (csv) has all the coding at the line/expense level, but the coding may be 50 lines long.  While this may be the only option, project reports at the natural account line level will not be exponentially longer which is of little value to us.   

Any help of examples of how to solve this issue would be very helpful as we really wanted to move forward with Concur until we hit this roadblock.  Thanks in advance for your time.

[JorgeL]

Hello,
I would like to know the answer to this as well, as it is very helpful. What I would suggest in the meantime is to get the report extract and run a pivot table, that way you will be able to get the summary information by employee and by GL account. I believe Concur also offers Extract Services, which can modify how the extracts are set up. You may want to contact them too.

[KevinD]

@Seanb are you needing approvers to see the breakdown of what they will be approving or a breakdown of what they approved? I'm asking because from how I understood what you said, all this information can be reported on from the Cognos reporting tool. However, this is only after reports have been fully approved.

If you are using our Allocation feature, you can see all the breakdowns of all the expenses from the Allocations screen. This is visible by approvers and processors. These can also be edited by processors if need be.

These are the only two ways I know to see the entire breakdown of how the expenses on an expense report were charged.

[Seanb]

Hi Kevin.  Thank you for your response.

The answer is both.

Budget managers need to see what they are approving, in total, to the different projects.  They need the visibility both before approval, but also after.  Some of our projects involve outside partners and the expense report itself, including receipts and summary coding (dollars and project), needs to be available.   As is, we have been told that we have to manually add up the amounts line by line - highly inefficient. 

What was approved, in summary, needs to be visible to the AP processors as well.   They have the additional responsibility of verifying the coding.   When viewing at a summary level, this is easy.   Most expense reports are going to one to three natural accounts (GL/Account (project).   If they have to look line by line, this becomes inefficient.  

Since we are still in pre-sales making sure the product will work (great on the front end and our struggle is this coding on the back end), we have not used the allocation feature yet.  Is this at the expense report level or at the line-item level?  I found one video, but it goes expense by expenses.  Unclear if I selected all expenses if it would show me a summary.  

In a perfect world, the summary coding would be on the detailed report or receipt report.  One place for everything vs running the receipt report and going to a separate reporting tool to get the coding. 

Thanks for your help, I do appreciate your efforts.

Sean 

[KevinD]

@Seanb I was doing some testing and you can view the allocation summary to see a breakdown by project. See my screenshot. You can see that one set of expenses was charged to two projects and another set of expenses was charged to two other projects. This sounds like what you are describing.