Business Purpose for credit card transactions

[Aforseth]

My question for the group is:  What business purposes are other companies instructing their employees to use when completing credit card transactions, mileage reimbursement, or personal reimbursement?

Our current practice entails employees using the following codes:

For credit card transactions:  CC-initials-vendor-business purpose

For mileage reimbursement:  Mileage-initials-business purpose

For personal reimbursement:  Just the employee's initials.

This clearly outlines the protocol for each type of transaction and reimbursement.  However, finance has been spending over 2 days at month end to correct the business purpose for over 80% of the transactions.  We are thinking of just having the employee enter the vendor and the business purpose and have finance add the employees' initials on the back side, before the journal entry is uploaded into our accounting system.

I'm interested in learning about the practices of other companies regarding business purposes for transactions, particularly if they differ from our current method.  Specifically, I'd like to know if they make additional entries on the back side of the journal entry to elaborate on the business purpose.  Could anyone share insights or experiences regarding this matter?

[KevinD · Accepted solution]

@Aforseth hello there. I'm curious about a couple of things:

1. Why are employees entering their initials in the business purpose field? The report is already stamped with their name.

2. There should be a vendor field that gets populated from the company card transactions, so entering it again in the business purpose field seems like a little extra unneeded work. However, the exception to this is if you for some reason have the Vendor field hidden. If it isn't hidden, I don't think it is necessary to enter it again.

In my experience the business purpose has always just been that. It is easy to distinguish card transactions from out of pocket/cash entries, so entering CC in the business purpose isn't really needed. Also, if they are entering a mileage expense, the Expense Type should be sufficient. Why would they need to enter the word mileage in the business purpose field when the Expense Type is clearly visible? 

From what you explained, it seems like you are having employees enter some redundant information. That's just my opinion based on working with various types of our customers. 

[Aforseth]

Kevin, 

Our journal entry generated from Concur includes our G/L account numbers, transaction date, username, and business purpose.  If employees don't indicate CC-initials, and vendor name, it becomes challenging to identify the purchaser and discern whether the transaction was made using a credit card, for mileage reimbursement, or for personal expenses.  Additionally, for our payroll reimbursement spreadsheet sent to a third-party administrator, it's essential to differentiate between mileage and personal reimbursements. It seems that the current setup of journal entry export from Concur might not be configured correctly.  We are considering manually combining the employee's username with the entered business purpose and adding CC for clarity. However, for mileage and personal reimbursements, we still require employees to specify "Mileage" to distinguish between the two.