Company Reimbursement for Personal Charge on CBCP Card

[DCormier]

How is everyone handling company reimbursement for personal charges that get placed on a company bill company paid corporate card?  We have very few instances of this since employees are not allowed to use card for personal expenses however occasionally it does happen and I end up having to chase down the employee for reimbursement. I would like to automate the process somehow.

[kyliekallhoff]

We mark them as personal on the report and they net against any out of pocket expenses that the employee has. Our out of pocket reimbursements are paid through ADP so if there happens to be only a personal expense or if the personal expense is more than the out of pocket reimbursement, it is taken out of their payroll. This works very well for us.

[vandevoortla]

We manage our own payroll, but do the same. Just research state employment law regarding withholdings. Some may require that you provide another option to employees for reimbursement.

[pd]

if money is owed will concur subtract it from a different report that has money owed to the employee if there arent dollars available in the report that has the personal expense.

[KevinD]

This all depends on if you have the configuration of Apply Offsets activated or not. If you do, then the system will automatically reduce the amount owed to the employee for all out of pocket expenses by the amount they marked as personal. Therefore, in essence, paying back the company. If you are not using the Apply Offsets option, then you will have to track down the employees that owe the company money. 

I would suggest creating an email reminder for those who have marked a corporate card expense as personal that reminds them they owe the company money. 

Kevin

[Jeremy]

If the Apply Offsets is activated, does the employee see that their cash reimbursement has been reduced when they submit the report?  Does it also show how much they still owe (if any)?

[HLehman]

How does someone activate the configuration of Apply Offsets? Also, do you know how to then have the remaining personal expenses (if there is not enough out of pocket expenses to net out the personal expenses) sent to payroll so the company can be reimbursed that way?

[carrol]

Hi Kevin,

Where is the "Apply Offsets"?  is it in the Concur admin settings or in the SAP CTE settings?  We were getting the net for personal expense and cash owed to employee in the 1809 SAP S4 Hana version but no longer with an upgrade to the 2020 S4 version.  

Thanks in advance for your help.

Carrol

[GrantC]

Hi Carrol,

The setting is on the Concur side, but if you are using SAP ICS (cte_setup in SAP) to integrate your Concur data with your SAP ERP, then offsets are not supported. Activating the feature in Concur will cause the financial postings back to SAP to fail.

Thanks,

[meaton55]

Does this only work if the cash out of pocket expense and the personal charge on the corp card are on the same expense report?      

[HLehman]

Hi, I am curious how did your company  set this process up? My company is looking to do the same thing.

[afritts]

Hi Kylie,

We are looking into implementing something like this. Would you mind sharing with me your process? Concur configuration? Audit Rules?

[JessicaL]

Hello,

We have the same issue with our CBCP cards - it does not happen often, but it does happen. We have not been able to automate this process. Currently, our Processor sends an e-mail asking the employee to send the check. There is a bit of chasing the employee down. 

With our IBCP cards, it works differently - automated. They can mark the expense as personal, and then, pay the credit card company directly for their personal expenses.

Best,

[Josh]

Hey @JessicaL,

I'm interested in more information about your IBCP cards and how this process for your company works. We will be transitioning from CBCP to IBCP within a few months, and this would be a great way to handle personal charges.

So if a user has a charge, marks it as personal, does that information get transferred to your bank, and the bank issues a bill to the user? Or else how is it automated? I would love to take out as much user dependency as possible.

Thanks!

[AmberLee]

Hi Josh!

This is one of the main reasons IBCP are the best option for mos companies. The Individual part provides employee accountability while the company part ensures timely payments. You can set it up to autopay only the approved business expenses that have been processed through Concur which means any personal amount would remain outstanding, on the individuals account, and wouldn't be paid until they paid it. They pay the late fees, their card is delingquent etc. Technically the company is still responsible but nothing like payment notifications from the credit card company to get them to make a payment.

[Josh]

Welcome back, @AmberLee!

Yes, we are glad to be moving this direction and are in the initial phases for setting this up with the bank. And that is exactly how we'll be handling the payments, and cardholders will be responsible for any late fees.

Currently personal charges are reimbursed to the company via personal check, and it's up to the cardholder to send this in. Glad with the new program it won't be up to us to collect, but rather the bank's involvement (and the looming threat of a cancelled card!) will convince them.

[LauraQuiroga]

Greetings Amber, I found your feedback very useful to identify the pros of IBCP payment type. I have additional questions. Can I contact you? (I am your neighbor in Irving, TX) Thank you!

[GrantC]

I would look into two things and you will need some help from Concur to accomplish both:

1 - Look into turning on reimbursement offsets for your CBCP corporate card. When this feature is turned on the system will deduct personal amounts from the out of pocket expenses on the same expense report.

For example: if I have $100 in out of pocket expenses on my expense report and I have marked a $50 corporate card charge as personal the system will deduct the $50 in personal from the $100 OOP. You will pay the full amount to the bank and you'll only give me $50.

With proper communications up front, this works very well. The issue that can arise is if there is more personal expenses than OOP expenses on an expense report the system will offset as much as possible, but the user will still owe you the remainder. This works just fine, but it can be confusing for the user.

2 - Many years ago Concur acquired a company called Gelco. As part of that acquisition we added a couple features from the Gelco product to the Concur product. One of those features is called Balance Carry Forward. If this feature is turned on the user is allowed to keep any balance owed the company and the system will automatically deduct that balance from the user's next expense report. This setting is turned on at the Policy level.

The two settings above can be turned on individually or in conjunction with each other. In all cases you'll need to track the balances employees owe you, but the system is trying to take as much of the collections work off your hands as possible.

[SandraA]

Handling personal charge repayment is a  time consuming issue for us.  We have both processes  Grant mentions turned on.   The system does subract the personal amount. 

However 99% of the time the employee does not have cash that offsets their charge.

We're puzzled by the fact that apparently in most other companies all their employees happen to have cash amounts to offset.

Handling personal payments is about half of a full time headcount for us.   We've researched various options but so far have not found one that works.

Since Uber and Lyft came along our personal charges more than doubled.   Employees can't seem to keep the personal vs business cards straight.   Amazon is also a major headache since they don't let you label or describe the cards you store so it's too easy to use the wrong card. 

(How is it that the Worlds largest retailer can't add a simple description field to method of payment??)

[TCBentz]

Hello Grant - We are in the process of implementing a CBCP card program.   For now, we want the employee to be reimbursed the total amount of cash out of pocket charges, even though they have company card transactions marked as personal.   It was my understanding that by turning off reimbursement offsets for our CBCP corporate card, the system will NOT deduct or offset personal amounts from the out of pocket expenses on the same expense report, is this correct?  When testing this new payment type (with reimbursement offsets not used and balance carried forward disabled) I found that any reimbursement for cash out of pocket charges due to the employee were offset by CBCP personal charges.  When I reviewed this with Concur I was told   " this is currently not possible because it is by system design that ‘offset’ setting in CBCP Payment Type has NO impact on how payments are made and the ‘Report Totals’ will look the same whether the offsets are turned on or off. The workaround at this time is by doing separate reports for out of pocket and card transactions marked as personal expenses." 

Let me ask, is it not possible for the system to NOT deduct any CBCP personal charges from what the employee is due for cash out of pocket transactions?

If it is possible, please let me know what settings need applied. We want the employee to be reimbursed the total amount of cash out of pocket charges, even though they have company card transactions marked as personal. We rather not have seperate reports for out of pocket transactions and another report for the card transactions marked as personal.

Thank you in advance!

Tracey
 

[Bennington]

Hi Tracy,

The process you described in your message is absolutely correct in how Concur is designed to work with CBCP cards. If an employee has a mix of personal and legitimate expenses, then the balance is automatically reduced from any amount due to the employee.

If I understand correctly (and I am happy to be proved wrong), there is a slight confusion about what reimbursement offsetting means....

This is the way I have understood it to work:

Scenario: Imagine a situation whre the total amount of the personal charges is greater than the total amount of legitiate business expenses. E.g. personal total = 50 and expenes = 40, the employee owes the company 10. 

Normally (without reimbursement offsets) the employee would be expected to make a repayment to the company for the 10 - which means their balance is cleared down for their next expense claim.

However, With reimburesement offsets applied, the employee is not expected to repay the company for the 10, instead this amount will automatically be reduced from the balance of their next expense claim. Concur keeps track of this balance in the system.

NOTE - if you are using the SAP FI Integration with Concur - then reimbursement offsets are not supported, as the outstanding balnce is kept in the employees vendor account.

I hope this helps, happy to provide any additional info / help if you need it.

Dave