Expense report process overview

After you subscribe to Time and Expenses, the life cycle of an expense report follows a traditional path that should be intuitively familiar. Employees create and submit expense reports, which are presented to the employees' managers for approval. After approval, the expense reports become reimbursement request candidates for the accounting department to process into pending reimbursements, from which checks are printed.

Two exceptions are:

• When an advance payment is issued before the employee creates an expense report. In this case, the accounting department first creates an advance payment, and prints a check. Later, the employee creates an expense report and the accounting department applies the advance payment to the payment request for that expense report.

• When employees email their travel or other receipts and use artificial intelligence (AI) to assist in coding them. Machine learning (ML) remembers the changes for future receipts. Employees can use these electronic receipts to create expense reports.

Approve or decline expense reports

This section is for the employee's manager.

If email notification is turned on, you'll receive an email notifying you that an expense report is ready for your review. If not, you need to regularly examine the expense reports that are ready for your approval. For more information, go to Approve or decline expense reports.

Unapproved expense reports become editable in the employee's list of expense reports. Approved expense reports become candidates for reimbursement requests.

Reimburse expenses

Reimbursing expenses is a two-step process:

1. Create reimbursement requests from the approved expense reports.
2. Make the actual reimbursement (unless advance reimbursement was already made via cash).

First, reimbursements must be approved if you have implemented the optional reimbursement approval process and if the reimbursement falls within the amount range that requires approval.

Then select the expense reports you wish to pay. For more information, go to Select expense reports to reimburse. Here, you can select the reimbursement method, which can be check, online, or cash. The cash reimbursement method is a way to record the fact that you made (or will make) cash reimbursement. If you select Online, a check is printed and mailed for you by the online printing center.

However, the most common method is checks that you print locally. Assuming you select this method, you can do a check run. For more information, go to Print expense reimbursement checks.

Maintenance

Accounting personnel must perform a number of regular tasks.

• Review pending

  Regularly examine the expense reports that have been approved and are ready for reimbursement. For more information, go to View pending expense reimbursements.

• Partially edit or reclassify submitted expense reports

  You might need to change errors in expense reports after they are submitted.

• Create expense reports for others

  It might be necessary for you to enter an expense report for someone else. For example, the person has left the company and no longer has access to Intacct. For more information, go to Expense summaries.

• Run reports

  You might want to run reports, such as an expense ledger. For more information, go to Expense Ledger report.

  You can also view and void posted reimbursements. For more information, go to Void posted employee expense reimbursements.