How often do you have employees submit expenses?

[tjbmoreno]

We request Reports be submitted on a per trip basis. For non-trip expenses, we request a monthly report. I find this really simplifies auditing though it can result in a higher number of report submissions - hence higher transaction fees.

[RichardG]

Hi Terri - totally see your point and would follow suit but that would equate to 700 expense reports per month for trips alone adding cost and administrative burden on my approvers. I ask employees to combine their trip and non-trip expenses into one report. The use of Concur Audit as well should give the Approvers confidence that each transaction has passed through some hoops before it lands on their desk. We know there are "ticker and flickers" in this cohort but I would hope they would check my trips to exotic locations were for business and not pleasure. I'm getting a demo on Tuesday of AppZen's AI Rebadged as Concur Detect - I would love to use it in such a way to identify low risk reports that can be automatically approved.

Kind regards

[Josh]

Hi @tjbmoreno,

For my company, we advise all users to submit no more than two reports a month. We have three types of employees in this regard:

-Company credit card only users
-Reimbursement only users
-Company credit card and reimbursement users

For the users who only use a company credit card, we advise them to submit only one report per month, keeping in line with billing cycles. For instance, if the bank has a billing cycle from May 25th through June 24th, the user should submit a report with only the transactions that post within that period. We ask them to attach a PDF of the bank statement to their report so as to match up the total on it to the Concur report total.

For users who only submit reimbursement reports, we want to be sensitive to payment schedules and get them their reimbursements in a timely manner, which is why we advise no more than two. For us, we get reimbursed through our payroll provider, and any reimbursements show up on users' bi-weekly paychecks. Because we get paid (essentially) twice a month, the reimbursement report frequency reflects that. We batch out the reports every two weeks and send them to be paid on the payroll dates.

We've had users submit multiple reimbursement reports within a short time frame, and we had to have a training that explained submitting multiple reports does not shorten the time it takes to receive reimbursement. Mostly this was a perception issue that employees had from a previously held job and the process they were used to there.

We also suggest a minimum of $50 for each report, as we do everything we can to reduce our number of reports submitted each month. We've had users submit reports for as little as $2 in the past ($2!), and had to, again, re-steer their understanding of how the tool worked in our organization.

For users who submit both company credit card and reimbursement reports, we advise them to just submit one of each report each month. Again, following the credit card billing cycle, and just grouping all reimbursements into another report for the whole month. This way, no user should be submitting more than two reports in a given month.

[Felix]

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@Josh wrote:

Hi @tjbmoreno,

For the users who only use a company credit card, we advise them to submit only one report per month, keeping in line with billing cycles. For instance, if the bank has a billing cycle from May 25th through June 24th, the user should submit a report with only the transactions that post within that period. We ask them to attach a PDF of the bank statement to their report so as to match up the total on it to the Concur report total.

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Hi Josh - I'm very glad to see such a detailed sharing of how your company use Concur expense. I give you my first comment in this community!

Reading your post, I see your company set up some real rules for users using a company credit card, like one report per month with only transactions within the period and the total amount matched to the PDF billing statement. Pretty strict rules compared to my company!

With those rules applied, it kind of increases the difficulty of submitting a credit card expense report. With that difficulty exists, I am curious for how your company guarantees that these users submit their expenses on time? I see credit card users from my company delay their submissions for various reasons... Headache! Do you have any effective punishment for a late submission of the credit card expense report in your company?

Appreciated if you can share some insights!

Felix

[Josh]

Hey @Felix,

Well a guarantee that the users will submit on time would be great! We have no such guarantee, but we do have some processes in place to help encourage our employees to get things done on time.

Firstly, reconciliations for our almost 900 cardholders are due around the 5th of the following month, but they can submit them any time after the billing cycle has ended. Many of our employees do these as soon as they can - which is very helpful - but many do not.

We have two measures in place to discourage late submissions, one is almost subtle and doesn't directly impact the employee right away, and the other is more overt and does.

The first measure is that their coding is not guaranteed to hit the General Ledger correctly. Shortly after the due date (2 or 3 days, because we like to be gracious - haha), we run four custom reports built in Analysis that returns all of the data for the corporate credit card transactions made within the billing cycle. Through a process, we combine the info in those four reports and it generates an accurate capture of the coding applied to the charges. It captures all itemizations, allocations, comments, and all of our custom cost tracking fields for each transaction. We utilize this method (instead of relying on batching out reports) so that we can make sure every single transaction is accounted for. We're capturing 100% of corporate credit card activity whether the employee has reconciled the month or not.

If an employee has not completed their reconciliation, the default cost tracking values assigned to their profile are used. The default Expense Type a transaction is assigned when it's import is also used. If the Expense Type is Undefined, we assign it a miscellaneous Expense Type as a catch-all for any stragglers. 

If they don't get their reconciliations done on time, there is the risk that they won't be able to code the expenses the way they need to, and they'll need to do some reversal / redistribution of the expense in the next billing cycle. Not an enormous hassle, but still a deterrent to missing the deadline.

The second measure we have in place is the use of the Compliance Control that notifies users (and their supervisors) that they have unused card transactions. We don't have this turned on all the time, but rather use it like a light switch. On the 20th of each month, we input the number of days that have passed since the last cycle ended (so for June 20th, we'd count back to May 24th - 27 days), and turn the control on. At 7:00 PM Pacific on that day, emails will be sent out via Concur's automated system informing the cardholders and their supervisors that there are overdue transactions. In the morning of the next day, we turn the control off.  That way, they only get the email one time.

The next step after this is to concurrently run a report with a list of who hasn't submitted yet. If, by the 20th of the following month they still have not submitted that first month's report, their card is cancelled.

Sounds a little strict, but we have had a few cardholders in recent years take advantage of the fact we don't have a tight policy on this, and they unfortunately were able to make loads of unauthorized personal purchases with no ramifications. These measures are also all explained to the cardholder when they apply for the card, and sign a form saying they agree to these terms.

Also, this is just the current plan. The step of cancelling cards of non-compliant cardholders has not actually occurred yet, as we are going to be implementing those steps next month for the first time. We may get into this and realize we need to adjust it a certain way, and we'll do so if it comes to that. But that's what we do to try and maintain a high percentage of compliance in our organization at this time.

Hope this helps; let me know if you have any questions!

[Felix]

Hey Josh - thanks for your reply and your kind heart for sharing!

I have to say that the first method you introduced is so brilliant! It transfers the workload of making reversal journals from accounting to expense users and at the same time, encourages users to submit expenses on time to avoid the extra jobs! This is something we were trying to achieve but have never come up with when we first set up Concur Expense. I think our company should definitely consider this.

For Compliance Control, we are using it as well. But unlike your company using the automatic emailing system to report the delay submissions, we are sending emails manually (...) to corp. card users and copy in their managers if users failed to submit expenses on time for a certain period. Currently, we think doing it manually is more effective than sending automatic emails but it indeed takes a ton of communication works. We have less than 100 credit card holders so maybe that's why we can still handle this - lol. Maybe it's time for automation for this part as well.

Now I think my company's policy needs to tighten up a little compared to yours. I hope your third plan goes well in the next month.

Thank you so much again for sharing!

[LisaS86]

Good afternoon,

The current guideline we set is to group multiple trips on a single monthly report and to submit within the corporate credit card cycle. Frequent travelers must submit their expense reports more than once a month in order to stay within their credit card limit and to keep the account in good standing. We allow for a mixture of credit card transactions and cash reimbursements on the same expense report and both types of payments are processed through Concur Pay.

We try to control the number of claims through the system by only giving Concur Expense access to those employees who have been issued a corporate card.

[tjbmoreno]

How do employees without corporate cards get reimbursed?

[LisaS86]

If an employee isn't issued a corporate card, it is becuase there is little to no travel expected for their position or they are a contractor.

In cases where an employee travels or has incurred any business expenses, they can submit for cash reimbursement on a manual expense report form. If employees are travelling together and one has a card and one does not, the major expenses such as hotel room and car rental can be put on the corporate card. They are generally in the same cost center and if not, the employee is able to allocate the charge to the approropriate cost center.

This doesn't occur often as most corporate office employees don't travel and our field employees and executives all have corporate cards. 

[tjbmoreno]

We completely did away with expense reporting through any other avenue due to the risk of duplicate payments.  It's paid through SAP Concur, or it's not paid at all.

[MGordon]

We do the same. 

[MGordon]

We have our employees to submit their expenses within 14 days of incurring the expense.  We do encourage them to add multiple expenses to each report. 

We also run a report on the number of reports an associate is submitting each month.  We address the ones who are submitting too many unnecessarily.

[Anonymous User]

Is the report you run to see the number of reports a team member submitted in a month a standard report or a custom report?

We have been making an attempt to reduce the number of reports each month but in some cases there is a ligitimate business reason to have numerous reports submitted within the same month.

[MGordon]

We built a simple Cognos report to pull this info.

[jsportsman]

Since we have a lot of invoicing to our clients and each invoice has to be the full trip. We ask that the expense report have full trip visibility and each ER to be processed per trip.  

Thanks!

Jason

[JessicaL]

Hi @tjbmoreno,

We suggest two reports per trip:

1. Pre-trip expenses (Airfare, Parking Spot Reservation)

2. Trip Expenses (hotel, taxis, car rental)

Any non-travel expenses we suggest one report a month at minimum.

[Nancyagfa]

With the number of travelers we have and a small staff, we require 1 report per month and they can track their business purpose by line item.  We have IBIP corp cards and batch every night so no one is delayed in getting their reimbursement to pay their bill.  I would exceed my report limits per month and have to upgrade or pay overage. If someone doesn't have a card, they also are required to report once per month, which usually comes after that one trip since their lack of a corp card makes them a very infrequent traveler.