Deep Dive: Taking over as an Expensify admin? Here’s your guide to a smooth transition!

Isabela Stisser
Isabela Stisser Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 200 Expensify Team
edited May 2021 in Deep Dive Docs

If you're a new policy admin taking over an existing Expensify account from a colleague who’s leaving or has already left the company, here are the steps you need to take to make the transition as smooth as possible:

  • Take over policy ownership and add a payment card to your account
  • Update any connected integrations
  • Change the technical contact for your policy
  • Get access to the (company/policy?) withdrawal account
  • Remove the old admin from the policy if they’ve left the company
  • Attend our webinars related to your account including the Admin Onboarding
  • If possible, switch to  a more general email (ie: expenses@company.com)

Take over policy ownership and add a payment card

The first thing that you’ll need to do when taking over the admin duties of an existing company setup is to take ownership of the policy and billing responsibilities. Note: Your account must have the Policy Admin role to take over ownership.

To take over billing, go to Settings > Policies > Group and click on the appropriate policy name. Then, on the policy Overview page, click Take Over Billing

If you don’t already have a payment card entered in your settings, you will be prompted to add one once you click "Take Over Billing". A payment card is required to complete the transfer of ownership.

To add or update a payment card in your account, head to Settings > Your Account > Billing > Add Payment Card.

If you need to take over ownership of several policies, please make sure that you will follow the steps provided above for each policy. Please note that if you only take over ownership of one of the policies and they are tied to the Annual Subscription, the old owner will continue to be charged for the other policies. So if you take over ownership of all the policies, you will also take over ownership of the Annual Subscription moving forward.

Update connected accounting integrations

It’s important to update any connected integrations in your Group policy with new admin credentials.

As a Policy Admin, you can remove an accounting integration by heading to Settings > Policies > Group > [Policy Name] > Connections, and selecting Disconnect Policy under the currently enabled connection. When disconnecting from an accounting integration, any data imported from the integration(categories, tags, report fields, tax rates, etc.) will be removed from the policy settings.

Don’t worry, this won’t affect previous reports that were already submitted by users under that Group policy. If expenses/reports are listed as Open, they’ll have these fields removed and users will need to manually re-add them once you connect the integration again.

Change the technical contact in your policy

In the event of any connection issues, Expensify will alert the policy billing owner by email. If you'd prefer to alert an IT administrator instead, you’ll have the option to add a different email as your technical contact.

Head to Settings > Policies > Group > [Policy Name] > Connections and update the technical contact.

Get access to the withdrawal account

If the previous policy owner reimbursed reports (and you’ll be taking over that responsibility) then you’ll need to set up the withdrawal account for your Expensify account. Keep in mind that when a company withdrawal account is added to a user’s account in Expensify, only that user will have the ability to make reimbursements.

If possible, the previous policy admin should share the withdrawal account with you before they leave. They can do this following the steps in this support article.

If the previous policy admin has already left the company, and no other policy admin has the withdrawal account in their settings, you will need to go through the setup process yourself.

In this case, go to Settings > Account > Payments and click Add Verified Bank Account to get started. Fill out the prompts and you'll be ready to reimburse in a few days. Please find instructions in this article.

Once you have access to the withdrawal account set yourself or the new reimburser as the default reimburser from Settings > Policies > Group > [Policy Name] > Reimbursement.

Remove the old admin from the policy if they’ve left the company

If the old admin has left the company and doesn’t need to submit any more expenses, you can remove them from the Policy Members list. Once you have changed the Billing Owner, the Technical Contact, and Default Reimburser you can remove the old admin from Settings > Policies > Group > [Policy Name] > People. Removing an old user will not affect any of their submitted reports but it will remove their access to the policy so that they cannot take any billable actions or submit additional reports to the company policy.

Watch the Admin Onboarding Webinar

The Admin Onboarding Webinar offers a great overview of day-to-day policy management and administration. You can watch the webinar here, and also find more training resources in this help article.

Pro-tip: Use general emails in your workflow

To save time if and when you transfer account ownership in the future, we recommend that you move to a workflow where the policy ownership is under a general email (example: expenses@company.com).

If you adopt this workflow, you won't have to update the billing owner or your approval workflow every time someone leaves. All you’ll need to do is give the new owner access to the general email and they’ll be ready to go!

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