Expense Report reminders and notifications

[rlipsey64]

Hi Everyone,

I have been a corporate Concur admin for 12 years and have recently taken a new role with a new company.  At my revious role we had several notifications for our employees (listed below) but my new company has very few.  What are you doing to make sure from a notifications perspective that you are doin to push employee to get expense reports done on time and to notify them of changes to thier report as it progresses through the workflow.

Previous role notifications:

1.  Employee - Card Transactions come in and Concur fires an emial notification that there are transactions to add to a report

2. Employee - A report is created but not submitted

3. Employe - Notifications as changes are made i nthe workflow (manage aproval, forwarded for approval, manager or AP "sent back", Extracted for payment, paid)

4. Manager - employees has outstanding expenses not submitted over 20 days old

5. Employee - Manager has not approved in the alloted amount of time and escalation has been applied ot your report

6. Manager - expense report in managers queue for approval

Finally, We have serious deliquentcy issues with employees submitting reports on time and I want to use report bursting for notifying managers of their employees expenses and delinquencies.  Do you do this and how many days do you set the report for?

While this should be a simple problem to sove, I have to make the notifications fit into our policies.  looking for how you handle Concur notification automation.

Thanks.

[AshleyB]

Hi @rlipsey64

Thanks for starting this convo! 

I look forward to hearing from your fellow community members what has worked for them. 

You can also check out some of our documentation on notifications here: https://www.concurtraining.com/customers/tech_pubs/Docs/_Current/SG_Exp/Exp_SG_Workflow_Email_Notifi... 

Having been an Admin for 12 years you probably are already familiar with this but more info is never a bad thing!

You could also check out our User Admin Group. Group members have access to the peer-to-peer knowledge sharing of this closed space for Admins as well as the "what's New in Product" blog where we share the latest updates right from our product teams.

Hope this helps!

[Steve]

Thanks for posting this, I am in the same position as you.  I have terrible on-time compliance and it is actually getting worse.  Currently we have no "stick" and I'm considering suspending credit cards until reports are submitted.  We use about 25 company credit cards, which we have to pay, but then we have to wait for staff to submit reports to get coding for their expenses.

We've tried incentives, notifying supervisors on delinquent submittals, and lots of education (best practices, etc).  This is presenting a problem for accounting since we have to use estimate for missing submittals.  And receipts...another problem.

Anyway, I'm hoping that we'll get a super user or Concur to offer ideas to improve employee complaince.

Steve

[KevinD]

@Steve Employee adoption and compliance can be frustrating, no doubt. I cannot offer any SAP Concur advice, but only what I've seen our cutomers do and one of things it something you mentioned. Suspending or turning off the corporate card until the employee is caught up. 

Without some kind of repercussion or a written out official company policy as to consequences of not submitting expenses, you get kind of stuck. I think maybe something to think about is getting your CEO, CFO or exectuives on board with coming up with a company wide official policy on expenses and what will happen to those who don't submit them on time. 

Kevin

[imonticelli]

Kevin, which report can I run to see only the late reports over 15 days.

[KevinD]

@imonticelli what makes a report 15 days late? Do you mean it was created and hasn't been submitted within 15 days of being created? Or does your company have a certain day in which reports should be submitted?

[aayushi261994]

Hi,

Sorry I can not help you much here but seeking a information on " Employee - Card Transactions come in and Concur fires an emial notification that there are transactions to add to a report" is it a built in feature or do we enable this feature?

[dlamont]

If you are on Professional Edition, go to "Expense Admin", Email Reminders. We've add many of our own email reiminders, (You can check a box to also email their approver) like the following:  

• company card transaction unsubmitted 30 days (pick your own # of days) Please submit! You add your own custom messages
  • also at 60 days, we have a reminder and an audit rule, that they can no longer submit ANY expenses via Concur - must be done manually and is reimbursed through Payroll and taxed (IRS Guidline - so blame them!).  Also has to go through a manual approval process which includes an officer - this helps to deter people from depending on this manual process.
  • The 60 day email reminder tells them they can no longer submit the card transction via Concur and will now have to pay the card  company personally (cards are paid direct to credit card IF submitted within time limit)
• Airfare unsubmitted 60 days (You can pick the Expense Types, if you wish)
• Unsubmitted Expense reports after so many days

Also Audit rules are great to limit what they can and can't do, especially with hard stops. If you don't allow them to submit, they'll catch on. But you should have a manual process in place - we call the Adobe fill-in form "Delinquent Expense Submittal", again for any transactions dated after 60 days.  But the limit is 6 months - again an IRS Guideline for an Accountable Plan. Note, that business size may be a factor.

Hope this helps!

Dlamont