Recent Update as Optional Feature: Expensify Reports are Locked after Export

Andrea_Creel

I was just informed by the Expensify concierge that a recent update now locks reports in Expensify after they are exported to an accounting integration "to ensure that data is preserved." While we understand the logic behind this decision, it really puts my company in a bind and requires that we now come up with a whole new system. Currently, we close out our finances on a monthly basis, but may not bill clients for expenses until after the event (which may be a month or two down the line, e.g., airfare). We then mark exported reports as Reimbursed to avoid duplicate exporting. However, along the way there may be cosmetic changes that need to be done to older reports, such as in the title or comments, before we submit them to clients. Until now, we've been able to "unapprove" these reports, make the changes, re-approve them, and create new pdfs. This is no longer possible. It seems that this is a feature that should have been developed as something that is optional for each company.This won't help us in the short-term, but please consider making it optional in a future update. In general, it would be preferable for more features to be optional, than not. 

JFL2019

I am on the 1st day of a free trial and experimenting. I "final approved" a test expense and because QB online was set up to sync, it synced it automatically and I could not unapprove it. Is there any way to delete it from Expensify?

evgeniya_a

Yes! We're in the exact same boat! Some things go unnoticed, until we start billing clients for travel expenses - for example 2 consultants have different per diem amounts for the same customer. When we check individual reports we assume they know how much to charge, but when we bill we see that there's two different rates used. Yes, we can fix the amount in NetSuite, but we can't attach Expensify pdf to client's invoice because amounts won't match. And now if we change the expense report in NetSuite it won't match Expensify.. so that's an issue in itself and completely defeats the point of this update in the first place!
Other times where we might need to unapprove a report - an employee switches subsidiaries and a report gets approved under the old policy. Need to delete and re-upload so it can go into a new subsidiary (under a new policy).
Or... we're training a new approver and they final approve something they shouldn't have. So now we can't fix it?
Love Expensify, but this is the worst update ever. 

Janessa

Same here, this portion of the update needs to be reversed ASAP. Trying to add receipts after a report was final approved and I am stuck. Please fix! 

Nicole Trepanier

@Andrea_Creel @JFL2019 @evgeniya_a @Janessa. Because only 0.2% of all reports are unapproved after export, we overlooked the use cases where you need to be able to unapprove. We are working on getting this corrected so it will only be restricted for users with the Expensify Card AND QBO auto-reconciliation. So sorry for the trouble this has caused. Hopefully we'll have it correct quickly. 

Nicole Trepanier

@Andrea Creel @JFL2019   @evgeniya_a   @Janessa We have removed this restriction so you should now see the option to unapprove your reports!

StephanieL789

Thank you for reversing this poorly thought out change. Please implement comment periods before future changes so more people have a chance to see how you are planning to make your product unusable for their purposes and other alternatives can be presented.

Kid

Hi team,

Thank you for the revert. It is really helpful.

The reason we are facing this is because we have a lot of comments and help tickets to change some info on the expenses.

I am wondering if you can provide a solution for this? How can users change their expenses after it has been approved? Changing the expenses has caused a lot of work for our team. We also want to figure out a way to solve this huge manual work.

Jason Li

Hi @Kid - your Admins should be able to now Unapprove Reports back to an Open status.

This will allow users to make any applicable changes to their Reports. If you're having some trouble, please feel free to write into [email protected]!