Receipt in Foreign Currency

[Khuuka]

Hello everyone

We have hotel charges feeding from our financial institution (Travel card) to Concur Expense  in U.S currency. When the traveler submitted the receipt in Concur Expense, the receipt is in foreign currency. Our travelers are having some challenges with itemization of charges such as sales tax, service and lodging due to receipt is in foreign currency, not U.S currency.  We want to know if your company is having this type of issue. If so, can you share some of your solutions or recommendations?   

Thank-you   

[Munari_alEXPert]

dear @Khuuka 

if I understood correctly you have the charge on the credit card in one currency, but the hotel bill in another currency and you need to itemized.

Firstly, as it is a more recurrent issues while employees or even general people travel in foreign countries, it is ALWAYS better to be charged in the country's currency people travel to, and mostly never to the issuing currency of the credit card. E.g. you have a credit card in USD and traveling to Mexico, always get charged on their local currency, as if the merchant charge your card in USD, they will apply a very inconvenient exchange rate (easily 5% or more if you didn't get charged in USD).

Said that, to itemize the hotel it is now a more manual calculation and depending on how within your company you must be so specific on the itemization. You will need to take the total of the credit card charge USD, devided by the total of the invoice in foreing currency, so you will find the real exchange rate applied for your invoice.

Take that coefficient and multiple  each transactions on the invoice with that coefficient (you might use an excel file to type all the data to avoid mistakes anywhere) and you will find the equivalent in USD for meals, taxes, hotel night.

Depending on where the bill was from, and if your company doesn't recover any VAT, I would take the total amounts per category (hotel nights+ taxes; meals; laundry...), multiply it for the coefficient of the exchange rate and decided for the number of nights, so you would have the average which for me still be consistent. (this is the case if you have different rates for hotel nights, different meals.... and with the itemization it will avoid entering one by one all those line).

I hope this is clearer now 🙂

[KevinD]

@Khuuka question for you...when the hotel charges are added to an expense report, is the user seeing only an amount in USD? When I use my AMEX outside of the U.S., I see two amounts; the amount of the charge in the local currency then the amount converted to USD. Are your employees not seeing this? I've always seen both amounts, which is what should happen for instances just as you describe, so employees can properly itemize. 

I'll await your reply, which will help me assist you better. 

[Khuuka]

Hello

Kevin,

The hotel charges are auto feed to Concur Expense (Available Expense Section).  The traveler assign the charges from their Available Expense profile to an expense report. The charges feed over from the financial institution is in US dollar (roll up total-not itemized).  The traveler needs to use the receipts to itemize for sales tax, room service and other charges. The  actual receipt from the hotel is in their local currency (foreign).  Therefore the employee has no way to tie the total in Concur (US) to do the breakdown/itemization  (Foreign currency).  Hope this helps further clarify our situation.  Thanks!

[shibukurian]

Hi @Khuuka, since you are not getting the invoice breakdown description and amounts in English but in local language, do not see any easy way to find the correct itemized entries to be entered in Concur. Mostly it  works on guess as biggest spend will be 'nightly rate' and smaller amount as 'tax lines'.

Google translator sometime can help.

Some Finance team use 'Image to text' convertor apps during claim audits but I can understand it is not an optimal solution.

[Dgupt3]

Do we have an option to translate the scanned images to English in SAP concur?

[Dgupt3]

Do we have an option in SAP concur to translate the comments from local language to English.Example :- If an employee has mentioned the comment in an expense line item in Spanish, is there any option / feature in concur to translate it to text.

As of now we are using Google lens and translate.

[KevinD]

@Dgupt3 we currently do not have any automatic translation options built into the tool. 

[Khuuka]

Thank you for your suggestions.