If you think you have strange expense reports, you must see this! Robert Half Management Resources survey interviewed several CFOs and asked them to name the most unusual things they have seen employees include in expense reports. The results – bound to raise both eyebrows! Here are a few of the most questionable items:
– Cosmetic surgery
– Lottery tickets
– Pet food
– A trailer rental for a family reunion
– $12,000 for a family trip-+
– A teepee
– A fine for crashing into a toll booth
The survey was developed by Robert Half Management Resources, and it was conducted by an independent research firm. The survey included responses from 1,600 U.S. and Canadian CFOs from a random sample of companies with 20 or more employees.
The list also included gadget, leisure and hobby expenses:
– A person lost his personal cell phone somewhere in the office, so he submitted the cost of a new one
– Movie tickets
– Hotel charge for viewing adult movies (Yikes!)
– Day at the spa
– A golf trip for the employee and his three friends
– Video game console (PS4 maybe?)
Personal expenditures were frequently cited by executives as questionable. Here are some examples:
– Grocery receipts
– Cigarettes
– Pair of socks
– Toilet paper
– Hot tub supplies
– Golf clubs
– Expensive lunch for the employee, without clients
Expenses covering the cost of personal celebrations and not related to the office was equally if not more surprising:
– Flowers the employee bought for his wife
– Expenses for his son’s birthday party
– Wedding anniversary dinner
Anyone submitting an expense report should double and triple check their expenses to avoid this situation, which could definitely land the employee in hot water. One respondent said “The most unusual thing I saw was a submission for something that had already been expensed and reimbursed”
Are you still filing expense reports in Excel sheets and attaching paper receipts with Scotch tape? Then it is time to change that and officially enter the 21st century. Using smartphones and web based applications, the modern day business traveler utilizes the latest technology to efficiently complete expense reports and also make sure that the company’s dollars are spent wisely.
This Dilbert cartoon says it all – Manual old school expense reporting is just painful!
Expense Reporting is painful! The time for change is now! Rather than taking large risky steps, many businesses are turning to the cloud for cost-effective T&E expense management tools that automate and streamline the creation, review and approval of expense reports. Using smartphones, travelers can track expenses as they happen, take photos of receipts, and submit expenses all from the palm of their hand in seconds!
Some of the key areas to look for while evaluating expense reporting solutions are:
1) The ability for employees to photograph , attach or email electronic receipts and easily assign them to line-item expenses
2) Expense reporting systems where credit card transactions can be imported
3) The ability to send T&E expense data into any accounting system like QuickBooks, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, Oracle etc. through automation
Gorilla Expense offers all of the above, and is fully integrated with various corporate credit cards and Accounting systems, which means manual data entry is reduced in multiple places, accounting errors are eliminated, employees are reimbursed faster and billable expenses can be tracked easier. In conclusion, whether on the road or back at the office, businesses and employees can now easily manage their T&E expenses – online, or on a smartphone with just a few clicks! So jump in to the 21st century with us!
Our expense reporting customers love our credit card integration module and find it to be a huge time-saver and hassle-minimizer for their users. The main purpose of this post is to quickly explain how the credit card integration works with our system. So here goes….
Two Words – Very Easy!
In our application, users can automatically download transactions from their corporate and personal credit cards with the click of a button. This uses the standard OFX format, supported by most banks and credit card companies. As a 1st step, the user must setup the credit card profile in the system. Each user can setup multiple profiles and they can be a mix of corporate and personal cards. Each credit card profile can be allocated to different pay methods, as defined by the Accounting person in the company. Once this is done, the user can toggle between the various cards from a list and select one, as shown here
Expense-Report-Credit-Card-Integration
After a card is selected, the user would enter the login credentials as they would if they were logging into their online account, pick a start and end date and Voila! – all the transactions within that date range are imported into the transactions bucket of the application and ready to be pulled into a report, as shown below. This process can be automated a 100%
Expense-Report-Credit-Card-Integration
Allocating Transactions
Once this is done, the user can then assign these transactions to different expense types or GL codes. All information supplied by the credit card merchant is available within the transaction, including the meta-data. So each transaction will include the date, amount, vendor, city and additional fields depending on what is supplied by the bank/CC company. The user can also choose to break down transactions in more detail if needed. For example, a hotel transaction imported from a credit card will typically show the total amount. But the user can break it down into Room rate, Tax, Room Service and Laundry by using the sub-amount fields within the application. Remember, ‘More visibility = More Compliance’
Reconciliation of Credit Card Data
Once all the credit card data is available in the system, reconciliation, which normally takes hours or even days becomes very quick & simple too. Within the Gorilla Expense system, the accounting / AP person can quickly run a report by a pay method and filter by specific employees as well. This report can be exported in multiple formats (PDF, Word, Excel) and compared to the credit card data supplied by the bank for a quick analysis. This will quickly tell if the transactions are valid or if any transactions have been missed by the employee. Since reports can be created for specific date ranges, there is no need to wait till month end (when there are typically 15 other bigger issues to take care of!) to do this. The Accounting person can reconcile every day, week or 2 weeks to make it easier to manage.
Other Credit Card File Formats
Besides the standard OFX format discussed above, we support numerous other corporate card file formats as well. A few examples of key formats are – GL1025 from American Express, CDF3 from MasterCard, VCF from VISA, among many others.
The operating mechanism for these is slightly different from the one described above. These files supplied by the credit card merchant typically include credit card data for ALL users within the company. So unlike the mechanism above where users can import transactions themselves, here the Accounting person (or Admin) will use our proprietary utility called ‘Gorilla Integration Manager’ (GIM) to import the data into the system. Once the merchant’s daily credit card feed for the company is available and imported into GIM, it will automatically correlate specific transactions to specific users and push them to the respective user accounts. So the Admin can, for example, push 5000 transactions to the various user accounts in the system with the click of a button!! From there on, the user has to simply pull these transactions into a report and submit!
Hope you find this information to be useful. Contact us for more information or any specific questions we can help with at info@gorillaexpense.com.
During discussions with customers on our Expense Reporting Solution for Dynamics NAV, the inevitable question we get asked is what versions do we support or integrate with. And the answer is really most versions of NAV are supported.
Of course our expense reporting product’s integration with NAV 2013 and NAV 2009 is more seamless and robust simply because these architectures lend themselves better and offer more flexibility. Due to this we can be more be innovative and customer specific when integrating with these systems.
Needless to say, we spent quite of a bit of time initially reviewing the various NAV versions. We recently found a resource from Microsoft Dynamics that does a comparison of all the NAV versions which we wanted to share. For all the customers, fellow ISVs and VARs out there, here is a link to the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Feature Comparison Tool.
Hope you find this to be as useful as we did! If you have any questions or want to send us your feedback, please contact us at info@gorillaexpense.com.
Thank you for taking time and participating in our survey with Smart Selling Tools. We received tons of responses and great feedback from everyone! It was amazing to note how many companies still struggle with managing this cumbersome process based on the responses we received.
The winner for the iPad mini drawing is David Escobar (company name withheld per request). An email has been sent to notify the winner. Congratulations David!
We will be putting together a white paper that discusses the results from the survey and emailing to all participants. This will help guide their companies towards better managing the T&E expense reporting process and help with improving productivity and reducing costs.
Thanks again for participating! Stay tuned for more surveys and promotions…..
In the last few months, we have been receiving inquiries regarding our integration with ERP & Accounting systems in relation to some of the other expense reporting solutions out there. I think the key difference can be summarized as – Full Automation
Most of the other systems out there say that they can ‘integrate’ but what they really mean is that they provide a flat-file that can then be imported into the ERP system. Nothing wrong with this and it may actually work better for some companies. But when we refer to integration, we mean full 100% automated integration, which means – the Accounting person pushes a button and the expenses are available in the ERP system as GL entries or into AP. This makes a huge difference for our customers.
Using our integration manager utility, they are able to pick and choose expense reports they want to send. After that, they click on a button to push the expense data. Simple as that! We have heard from our customers that With this approach, there is lesser chances of errors, much fewer manual steps that need to be taken and it can be performed by anyone in Accounting or AP without any expert training. Plus, the mapping of parameters can be tweaked very easily within the integration manager by the Admin without having to redesign the flat file format. Thus the Accounting folks will have lot more flexibility in how the data is pushed to the ERP or Accounting systems. We guarantee that this approach is 21st century proof! 🙂
So, come take a look at this and some of the other advancements we are making in the expense reporting space. To see a list of some of the systems we integrate with, go to the ‘Advanced Functions’tab here. If you’d like to learn more or have any questions, as always, send us an email – info@gorillaexpense.com
We have been receiving several inquiries over the last few months about our integration with NAV2013 in relation to what would happen if NAV is hosted on the cloud. Here is the quick scoop –
Microsoft has made significant investments towards the “hostability” of NAV2013. This helps deploying and using NAV in the cloud, thus benefiting both customers and partners. Microsoft is currently fine-tuning deployment scenarios and developing guidance for deploying NAV on Azure. Microsoft expects to make deployment of NAV on Azure broadly available in Q1, 2013. They had initially planned it closer to Nov 2012.
Our application is deployed on the cloud too (as one of the options), specifically Azure (Yes, we are heavily Microsoft oriented and we love it :). With this option, the customer has nothing to worry about in regards to hosting the data, managing the application or tackling the overhead associated with maintaining a server, support etc. Our integration with NAV is agnostic to the hosting format employed. NAV can be on a dedicated server on the cloud or we could be co-hosted with NAV too. Neither approaches affect out integration from the user’s perspective. On the back-end, there will be a few more gerbils turning wheels. But the customer will always experience a seamless and fully automated integration between our solution and NAV.
This flexible integration and hosting capabilities between our solution and NAV makes life much easier for the customer, the partner and of course for us too. Read about our integration with NAV here. If you would like to learn more or have any further questions, send us a message at – info@gorillaexpense.com.
Meanwhile, here are some more tidbits about NAV013 you may find useful
– Microsoft announced the availability of NAV 2013 in 15 markets. With significant improvements in functionality and several new capabilities, this launch was hailed as the most significant release of NAV yet
– Functionality such as Cash Flow Forecast, Cost Accounting, and Excel Integration to Query enable greater accounting efficiency for customers while offering partners the ability to develop customized solutions
– The new NAV web client allows users to access NAV from virtually any device. Improved query and charting offer compelling ways to analyze and display data for more users
– Improvements to the migration tool, partner development tools, and increased interoperability with Microsoft technologies mean less time is needed for partners to customize and deploy solutions, and they are easier for customers to learn and have impact
– Specifically useful for partners, NAV2013 enables easier deployment, configuration and installation through the RoleTailored developer experience. The new .NET Framework enhancements makes it easier to build, deploy and integrate high-performing add-ons with existing NAV solutions, and share data more easily
Microsoft Dynamics GP2013 which was released on Dec. 19 has several new features that are designed to help SMBs grow their businesses. These features are powerful and very easy to use. From our preliminary research, some of the key enhancements that we have seen include:
A rich web client to access information when you need it and on the device of your choice
Improved cloud-deployment model to streamline deploying and managing GP in the cloud
Faster deployment with new “RapidStart” tools that significantly reduce time to configure GP for each customer
Deeper interoperability with Office 365, other Microsoft technologies & ISV products
Microsoft has indeed made interoperability very easy for ISVs like us. We integrate fully with GP2013 and it is seamless while the implementation time for our solution is almost immediate. The mechanism is similar to GP2010, in that once expense reports are approved by the manager within our system, the data is automatically pushed as GL entries to GP2013 with the single click of a button! This definitely provides a robust value add-on for T&E expense reporting and also extends the company’s investment in GP2013. We are extremely thrilled with the advancements made by Microsoft in GP2013 and look forward to seeing more.
Here is an interesting article from the Huffington Post on 10 ridiculous items for which employees tried to get reimbursement.The list is very interesting and diverse! Would love to hear your comments….
Our friends at the GBTA published a study on Travel Policy Trends: Control – what does it mean and who has it? Here is a teaser of the report –
“Travel professionals are playing an increasingly large and influential role in shaping and controlling business travel policy, aided by online booking tools and fueled by a growing focus on cost-saving efforts. This third annual study surveyed nearly 1,500 travel professionals in North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America to determine, for the first time ever, what “control” over travel policy means to them and how travel professionals are adapting to new and evolving business travel requirements..
Highlights include:
•Who has the control over travel policy?
•What “control” over travel policy means to travel managers
•What travel managers are doing to adapt to new and evolving environments
•How travel policy differs by company travel spend