Reporting on US unallowable costs

[J-Kap]

Hello!

My company is expanding Concur to the USA and there are strict rules on unallowable costs. Therefore the  finance team in the US are required to report on any unallowable spend.

For instance, if an expense user uses a company credit card (company paid) to take a governement official for a meal then this would be an unallowable expense.

E,g. If the expense user uses the expense type Entertainment Client and pays $100 in total on a meal, using the company credit card, and $20 of that is for the gov't official, then the finance team want to be able to flag the $20  and then run a regular report to show all the unallowable spend.

Could anyone offer their experiences on this?

Thanks

[KevinD · Accepted solution]

@J-Kap in your example are you then saying that $80 of the $100 is allowable? Only the $20 for the gov't official is unallowable? 

If so, then there are a couple things I can suggest and/or need to happen.

1. You probably want to have an expense type specifically called Unallowable Expense. This will make it easier for employees and make it really easy to recognize for all involved in the expense reporting process. 

2. Also, you could just have employees mark the $20 as Personal, so they are not reimbursed the amount and are therefore responsbile to either pay that $20 back to the company or send a $20 to the credit card company.

3. Or if the Personal Expense option doesn't work your end-users will need to be trained on Itemizing any expense that has Unallowable Expenses. In your example, They would categorize/itemize $80 as Business Meal and then the other $20 they would use the Unallowable Expense expense type. 

4. Finance could then build/run reports in Cognos that show the Employee, The Expense Report Name, any unallowable expense (or anything marked as personal) and the amount. 

Let me know if you need any clarification on anything I've said. 

[J-Kap]

Hi Kevin, Thanks for the suggestion, I think creating an expense type called unallowabe and having the user itemise the expense would be the best way forward. This would allow us to identify the spend via reporting. 

Many thanks!