How do you handle when a particular expense amount has been partially approved?

[mt7602]

In the world of business travel, management is always looking at business travel to save money.  When the employee's manager partially approves a certain amount of the expense that was charged in the company's credit card, the employee is responsible for reimbursing the company for the remaining amount.

How do you keep track?  does the expense report goes back to the employee to itemize the remaining amount as a personal charge? 

What is the pushback from travelers?  Any reports to use to keep track?

[tjbmoreno]

We don’t permit personal use of the card, but occasionally it does happen. Personal expenses must be marked as such and payment made directly to the card company by the employee. If it is a partial expense, it must be itemized out first, with the employee paying the personal portion and the company paying the business portion. This can be an issue in Europe with the new laws.

[MGordon]

We set up an expense type - Personal Expense (Non-reimburseale) that is used for any expense or partial expense that are not allowed to be expensed as a business expense.  In our situation, we only pay approved business so the employee is responsible to pay any personal expenses directly to the card provide. 

However, you can have items that are expensed to the Personal Expense type to go to a receivables account or clearing account that would keep track of any amont owed back to the company.  Cognos reports are also available.

Sometimes managers will require their employees to itemize an expense if it is higher than the company guidelines (having a strong policy is helpful). The report should be sent back to the employee to itemize correctly. In these cases the employee quickly understand the managers expectations on what can be expensed. 

[mt7602]

Payment to the card is not possible at this time.  How do you keep track?

I have an expense type personal charge on the company credit card. When there is a personal charge on the credit card, this expense type is used to request a payroll deduction to reimburse the company.

I also have an audit rule for the employee meals spend limits with a hard stop.  when the employee goes over this limit, the employee has to itemize the charge and request a payroll deduction.   but, the hard stop does not go away because is looking at the full amount and not that the expense was itemized.  any suggestions?

[GrantC]

By default Audit rules will only look at the parent transaction for itemized entries. However, rules can be setup to review the child entries as well.

On the Entry data object there is a field called Transaction Type. This field is designed to let you dig into the details of an itemization within your rules and has three values associated with it:

• Expense without itemization: This is used to identify a stand-alone transaction that is not related to an itemization in any way.
• Expense with itemization (total): This is used to identify transactions that have been itemized, and it focuses on the parent of the itemization.
• Itemized entry on an expense: This is used to identify transactions that have been itemized, and it focuses on the children of the itemization. 

When building audit rules that look at things that can be stand-alone or parts of an itemization (meals is a common example) it is good practice to include two conditions in the rule:

(Transaction Type = Expense without itemization OR Transaction Type = Itemized entry on an expense)

Be sure to use the OR operator between them and put them in parentheses as above.

This tells the rule to ignore the parent and only look at stand-alone entries and children in its evaluation.