Expense Reports: Control
Before employees begin building expense reports, ExpenseWatch.com is ready to control expenses in real time.
Before employees begin to create expense reports, ExpenseWatch.com enables you to configure your specific company expense policies and controls into the system. Then, as expense reports are created, you can easily identify and stop out-of-policy spending before it occurs. Here are just a few of the controls ExpenseWatch.com provides to enable you to configured the online expense software to match your company’s specific expense policies.
Business unit configuration
Your company’s organizational structure is represented by business units which can
be configured to a granular level.
- Users, user permissions and roles are components of each business unit
- Administrators have access to hierarchy, activation status, editing, adding and deleting
- Business units can be designed to match your corporate structure regardless of its complexity
Signature Authority Form & user permissions
The Signature Authority Form (SAF) defines the approval workflow for expense reports, purchase requisitions and invoices for each business unit. Your SAF is fully configurable based on your corporation’s hierarchy. As a transaction moves through the system, your SAF is automatically applied to create the correct approval chain for that transaction.
After creating your SAF, you can define the exact level of user access throughout ExpenseWatch.com. Permissions can be set for specific users or for groups of users as defined by role. The ExpenseWatch.com interface is configured for each user based upon individual permissions.
- Set transaction permissions, such as spending limits, for expense reports, requisitions and invoices
- Define editing permissions for vendors, categories, products, budgets, T&E categories and more
- Allow access to various ExpenseWatch.com reports
Business expense category attributes
ExpenseWatch.com configurable business expense categories enable you to set specific information fields that your employees use to provide details about the nature of their expenses. For example, you can create a category called “business airfare” and require the following attributes:
- Departure city?
- Arrival city?
- Was the ticket purchased 21 days in advance?
- What was the purpose of the air travel?
You can set this level of detail for any expense category your organization requires.
Category limits, tolerance levels and smart flags
As you build your travel and expense policy into the system, you can set flags to do specific actions when spending exceeds limits. For example, you can truncate the amount to category limits, or you can flag spending to allow managers to approve or disapprove spending that exceeds category limits on a case-by-case basis. Employees see out-of-policy spending as they fill in their expense reports. These visual flags help to reduce the number of reports submitted with errors, dramatically reducing your processing time.
Route and policy control
When an expense report is complete, submitters click Route. ExpenseWatch.com automatically sends an email notification to the appropriate approvers. Expense policies are automatically enforced based upon the policy, business rules and parameters you set. With ExpenseWatch.com, expense management and control becomes the rule, not the exception.
