Personal Charges on a Corporate Credit Card

[kgroschopp]

We have been using Concur for Expense Management for about 6 months and having some difficulty in handling employee personal items which are charged to a corporate card.  

We have set-up a checkbox to allow users to identify personal charges and are posting them to a clearing General Ledger account in our SAP system, however, we are not able to chargeback the employees bank account to recover the amount of the personal charge.  

The solution which was provided is to hold these personal charges until the employee eventually submits an expense report with out-of-pocket expenses.  At that time, the OOP reimbursement is reduced by the total amount of outstanding personal charges.  

Not a great solution for us as we are finding that we have personal charges outstanding for a long period of time. 

Anybody found a great solution for this in Concur?

[robbin-g · Accepted solution]

We have a weekly report of Personal Charges set up to be sent to our Payroll team. They then manually take the amount out of the employee's next pay.

Robbin

[KevinD]

@kgroschopp the solution mentioned is really one of the only options you have. However, I can offer what I've seen some of our customers do. 

First, you can create an audit rule that flags any expense marked as personal that was paid for on the corporate card. The rule can remind the user that they need to submit payment to the company for the amount of the personal expenses. 

Second, if you find you have employees that are repeat offenders or have outstanding personal charges you can let them know that if the behavior persists, their card will be shut off until they have "paid up" and no longer owe the company money. 

Third, if they user doesn't catch up on the amount owed to the company, suspend their card. This will force them to use their personal credit card while their corp card is suspended, which a lot of people don't want to do. 

Now, for the second and third things I mentioned, you do need to discuss this internally and write up an official company policy. If you don't have anything written up as official, you cannot really enforce it. 

Oh, I almost forgot. One other solution I've seen companies do is setup their corporate credit card as Individual Billed, Company Paid. What this does is makes it so the user's credit card account is tied to their name and that they do not receive reimbursement for expenses until they submit their expense reports. This also means if they have any personal charges on their corporate card, they are responsible to make payment and the outstanding balance on their corporate card is tied to them. 

From your description, it sounds like your company is receiving the total bill/statement from the credit card issuer and sending a lump sum payment to the card issuer to settle up all the accounts. This is what we call a Company Billed/Company Paid credit card. 

Anyway, these are some things I've seen done at other companies. I hope it helps. 

[JessicaL]

"One other solution I've seen companies do is setup their corporate credit card as Individual Billed, Company Paid"

We chose this solution and implemented it. Our employees are responsible for paying the credit card company for their personal expenses, and any late fees associated with paying on time. Generally, it works quite well for us, but is not suitable for all of our groups so we have some special circumstances as well.

[leabolee]

Hi Jessica, our company Concur system is set up like yours, where the employee is responsible for paying the credit card company for personal expenses. But sometimes they don't always pay it. We now have a liability to pay the credit card company, even for the personal charges, when the credit card reaches a specific aging, like 180 days past due.

Our previous expense system allowed us to "reverse" the personal transaction so we can put that transaction back into the employees available expenses, so we can create a report to pay the account in full. But I understand that Concur does not allow any transactions to be pulled back into the employee's Available expenses, if already approved on a report, even if it's just a personal charge.

Now, I need to make a payment to the credit card company. I have no solution yet from the Concur side. How do you handle payment off the employee's card, if you have no transactions in Concur left to submit? Do you make a manual payment through your Accounting system? If so, how?

[bmgoad]

We have "Non-Reimbursable/ Personal " expense type set up... if the users selects this then the amount is deducted from what is due the user. We do have this feed over to our ERP software. We are currently stuck on how to handle this once if it fed over to our ERP how it should hit our GL. Any advice? Thanks in advance.

[cpolifka1]

Hi KevinD,

When a user marks the expense as personal (do not reimburse), they at times ask what this means and are confused by the terminology that concur has on the expense report. What would you or anyone suggest to make this more clear as this is money due to the company. Thank you

[robbin-g · Accepted solution]

We have a weekly report of Personal Charges set up to be sent to our Payroll team. They then manually take the amount out of the employee's next pay.

Robbin

[amanning23 · Accepted solution]

Hello,

We have a company billed, company paid credit card. We created another checkbox next to Personal expense which says "Allow for Payroll Deduction" and we have some audit rules built around it. If the employee marks it as "Personal" and Opts in for Payroll Deduction, we send the list every 2 weeks to our payroll department to deduct the employees. For the ones who did not opt in, we have to manually follow up with them and tell them to send us a check or confirm if we can payroll deduct.

Thanks,

Adam

[kgroschopp]

I believe that the idea of a payroll deduction approval may have been mentioned earlier as well - - This seems like a great way to avoid any ensure that the employee acknowledges the deduction from their bank account through a payroll deduction.

[kgroschopp]

I wanted to get an update on this thread for any companies that are looking to solve the same issue.  

We are going to go with the direction to handle these reimbursements as a payroll deduction, but have decided to use a different option for the 'Authorization' that is required by the employee.

We worked with Concur to add a check-box on the user profile expense settings which will authorize our company to use the payroll deduction for any personal charges that hit the corporate card.  By putting this on the user-profile, we can avoid the additional step of requiring the user to check the box on each individual report-line that contains personal charges. 

Concur also added an audit rule that will warn users that have Personal Charges on a report and have not yet made the setting on their profile - The warning instructs users to remit reimbursement to the accounting team, since they have not authorized the payroll deduction.

Overall, a bit disappointing that Concur is not able to debit employees bank accts directly for these types of charges, but this solution is at least workable, without creating much additional work for payroll and accounting.  

Thanks for all the great feedback, and kudos to the Concur admin team for amazing turnaround time on this enhancement request for our company!

[stephanierenner]

@kgroschoppI like the idea of the audit rule warning them to update the personal setting. But, how does Concur know when it's a personal item?

[leedau]

@stephanierenner Thanks for posting in the SAP Concur Community. Generally, we see that customers configure a Personal Expense check box on the expense entry form or setting up a separate expense type. I hope this helps. 

[zmkelly1]

Hi kgroschoop, we're similar issue and this sounds like a good solution but would like to ask you a few questions.

1. Is you company still set up as Company Bill / Company Pay (CB/CP)? 

2. Does this work in a global setting? such as in China? 

3. Report totals - do the submitted expense reports show the amount due to company? 

A little background to our issue...We are CB/CP globally (US, Germany, China, Taiwan, Japan Korea). Originally, we just used the expense type "Personal Charges on Company Card" and would put an Intellectual Report once a month for this expense type to see who owes the company then would send to payroll for deduction or would let HR rep in the country what is due (as some country's you are not allowed to adjust payroll). The submitted expense report totals never showed how much the employee owed to the company. This is a necessity for my China team. So we added the "Personal Expense - Do not reimburse" Check box. The totals on the expense reports are now showing however if an employee doesn't have enough out of pocket expenses to cancel out the report cannot be submitted, if the report is submitted the charge now goes to Personal charge goes to the wrong GL and the Inteligent Report for the Personal Expense Type does not show the total the employee charged on their card.  Thank you 🙂 

[stephanierenner]

Hi, how do you handle personal expenses for partial claims?  Example, if half the items on the receipt are personal and the other half is business.. how does your checkbox work then?

[leedau]

@stephanierenner  You could itemize the expense and then check the box on the itemized entry that is considered the personal amount. Does that help?

[stephanierenner]

Hi @leedau yes, that helps a bunch! I didn't even think about itemizing, though I should have!  How does your company handle getting the reimbursement back to the company from the employee?

Stephanie