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
