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jessek21
Occasional Member - Level 3

Audit rule for Expense Assistant tool?

Are you able to have an audit rule to identify if the report was created by the Expense Assistant tool?

8 REPLIES 8
Josh
Routine Member - Level 2

Hi @jessek21,

Great question! I don't know of any options currently to do this in a Custom Audit Rule, nor in a custom report in Cognos, unfortunately. Maybe some more knowledgable folks can chime in, but while we're waiting, what are you trying to accomplish with the audit rule?


Josh
jessek21
Occasional Member - Level 3

I was thinking of utilizing an audit rule that would only allow expense assistant reports to be submitted in the system. This would limit the number of reports they could submit every month.

Josh
Routine Member - Level 2

Gotcha. I'm assuming you're trying to curtail issues of going over your monthly report quota?

So in my mind, that may not actually fix the issue, as Expense Assistant will create reports based on month or trip, but that doesn't mean it's limited to one report a month. For example, if I have a transaction come into my account today, Expense Assistant would create a report for September. Theoretically, I could submit the report today with just that single transaction on it. A week from now, if another transaction comes in and my initial report is approved, Expense Assistant will create another report for September, since no report already exists. I could then submit that report as well, since it was created by EA, even though I already submitted one this month.

Just from our experience, we had too many reports being submitted, and we engaged a few methods for reducing that number of reports submitted. First, we put this in our training for new employees. We said that the best practice would be to only submit one report per month for both credit card transactions and reimbursements, and detailed why.

Next, we put the onus on approvers to essentially say, "You are the gatekeepers, and this is the procedure. Please make sure your employees are not submitting reports too frequently."

Finally, we passed on the extra cost to our locations. We have multiple offices throughout the country, and while we are all a single organization, they do pay costs for maintenance and services, and that includes Concur. So if we go over our quota, the locations that go over are charged an additional amount proportional to how many they submitted in the past month. This may not be an option for you, but I thought I'd mention it as something we used to motivate users to not submit more reports than is necessary.

As for an audit rule that would prevent users from submitting more than one report a month, I'm not sure something like that exists. It may be a feature in Concur Professional, but we are only operating on Standard, so I'm unsure. I know all the methods I listed are all dependent on human involvement, which is of course prone to error, but my company's policy is not really a 'do or die' approach. Many of our senior level staff's opinions on this is that if the locations want to spend extra money submitting extra reports, that is up to them. This may not be the culture or approach your company may want to take, but it's been relatively successful for us.

Sorry I don't have a better or more technical answer for you, but I hope this info was a little helpful!


Josh
jessek21
Occasional Member - Level 3

Thanks!

It seems that you could create an audit rule (Report Submit) that prevents submission if it doesn't contain in the name /2018)

From my research, no matter the language, they all end in /YYYY).

Furthermore, you could also add dollar limit or creation date not within today - (number of days).

Then the report could only be submitted if it was older than those number of days.

Josh
Routine Member - Level 2

That is true, although users are able to edit the name of reports created by EA. Most do not, but it is a possibility.

And yes, if you were able to let your users know that they need to create the report the right number of days before they actually want to submit it, you could also do that. I would think that may be met with resistance, though. I could be a good employee and only want to submit one report a month, but if I don't create it soon enough, I won't be able to submit it on time. If I was in that situation, I'd probably create a bunch of reports, even if I don't want to submit any, just so I'd be able to have a report ready when I do want to submt one.

Just trying to play the Devil's advocate, as I try to think about anything that could go wrong when creating rules or logic like this Smiley Happy


Josh
JessicaL
Frequent Member - Level 1

I'm curious as to if there is anything in your policy about the recommended reports. For ours, we have the recommendation of submitting one trip for airfare and then, a second report for the actual trip expenses. Then, over time, we've been pushing that through as best practice since we use Concur Pay to pay the actual expenses to each individual credit card.

I can see that your goal is limiting expense reports - could you do a limitation for a minimum amount? However, the problem would be then that some employees wouldn't make the minimum limit for a very long time. 

Jessica
Travel and Expense System Administrator
ratushn
Occasional Member - Level 2

If you are looking to control your Expense Report count, look into the Dates Overlap Audit Rule. Basically, you need to create two fields in your Report Header: 1) Report Start Date and 2) Report End Date. We even were able to pre-populate these dates based on the Start and End Date used in the attached Concur Request. Then, create this audit rule such that if these dates overlap with any other submitted report, a hard stop will curtail the reporter from submitting this report. You can have the exception text state whatever action you would like the reporter to take - either to wait for additional transactions to appear or modify the dates of the report...etc.

joshhorton
Occasional Member - Level 3

Hi Ratushn- Could you send me the attached Concur Request that you refrenced?

We want to prepopulate the Header start and end dates and are interested in how you did this.