The integration with travel partners for work-related trips provides visibility to cost and policy limitations. Simultaneously, it provides approvers and auditors with a view of booking policy violations, ensuring travel policy adherence across the organization.
 

 

This client wanted an expense management system that could standardize its expense claim procedure across the globe. They hoped a global system would eradicate different systems in different entities, facilitate centralized expense auditing, and provide uniform approval processes and management. The system also needed to be easy to support and be outsourced.

As mentioned, our client had a variety of project requirements. We will explore some of the key considerations.

Expense Templates

• Our client wanted uniform expense templates across all entities with local variations for statutory requirements wherever necessary. The expense templates were made business unit-specific, and all included itemized expenses such as hotel bills, airport expenses, meals, etc.
• A specific requirement for some entities was to override the default expense account, which is set at the employee HR (Human Resource) This was achieved by giving ‘Override Expense Account Allocation’ privilege to specific users, or all users, to charge expenses against companies and cost centers that are not their default company or cost center.

Want to accomplish this in your own instance? Set the value for the EXM_ALLOW_FULL_ACCT_OVERRIDE profile option to Yes. This option can be set for a whole code combination or a specific segment. Navigate to: Setup and Maintenance > Search Tasks: Manage Administrator Profile Values > Search: EXM_ALLOW_FULL_ACCT_OVERRIDE

Payments

• Oracle Expense Cloud provides two ways to pay expense reports, seamlessly through Oracle Payables or through a third party by generating an xml output and taking an input to update the payment status. (Note: you can choose only one option for your entire application.)
• Our client has many entities and not all are equipped with Oracle subledgers, they are general ledger-only entities. By choosing Oracle Payables, the third-party option was obsolete. Because our client could not run the process to generate the report to process payments, they decided to keep the Oracle option open and generate a custom report through BI Publisher for the entities requiring an external payment system. This requires users to enter manual journals as well for accounting to take effect.
• Another payment-related issue our client faced was with payment formats for Asian and EU countries. Oracle has separated the employee record and supplier record, and there is no need to define the employees as suppliers (for contractors you still must do) in AP. Instead, employees enter their own bank account information on the expense page.
• This enables expense reports to be imported as a payment request and the employee as a party. The EFT payments in the US are processed this way without issue. Problems arise when additional information is required, like an address in Switzerland or a payment reason in Malaysia. There is no placeholder for this information in the employee party record. To resolve the issue, Inspirage prepared a custom payment format generated through BI publisher.

Cash Expense, Advance, and Approvals

• Oracle provides separate approval workflows for both expenses and cash advances, which is beneficial since advances do not require as many levels of approval. Inspirage worked to keep harmony between all entities with respect to approval levels and hierarchy. The first level of approval was from the immediate supervisor and subsequent levels were based on amount limits and approval groups.

Travel Authorization

• Travel authorizations also have their own approval workflow. Our client had been practicing travel authorization prior to travel, so this could be easily achieved. The travel authentication is selected from a list while submitting the expense report.

Policies

• When different per diem policies for each entity were set, they were assigned to their corresponding templates. Separate rates for weekends and holidays, meals inclusion, expense tracking against periodic limits, and different mileage policies for different entities were all included.

Project and Tax Integration

• Apart from Oracle Payables and Payments, users can enter project-related expenses through Oracle Project. If the user should be part of a project organization, he or she can access project tasks within expenses.
• Similarly, taxes can also be integrated into expenses by enabling the tax classification codes, which will not be in the lookup ZX_WEB_EXP_TAX_CLASSIFICATIONS if they have been defined prior to expense implementation.

Mobile device Integration

• Oracle provides a mobile app on both the Android and iOS platforms that enable users to enter expenses and upload receipts immediately. The mobile platform also enables users to track their distances for mileage calculations. By providing a map of the route traveled, managers gain additional transparency.

Custom Reporting

As Oracle Expense Cloud does not provide standard reporting for expenses, custom reports were created for the reporting requirement. These reports provide a detailed picture of the expense list for all business units.