How to view if managers are rejecting unauthorized reports?

rgondo
rgondo Expensify Customer Posts: 31 Expensify Admirer

Question: Is there an export column to see if a manager has rejected a report?

Or an export column to show all the comments in a report?


Scenario: I have many managers who are just rubber-stamping reports. There are many soft rules that Expensify does not enforce. For example, we require everyone to enter the check-in/out dates for any hotel stays. Expensify doesn't have a rule for this (maybe they should?) but we ask managers to look for this. However, everytime I audit, I do not see any evidence of this.


Feature request: I would like a way to export a report's comment and status history to help review and enforce soft rules which Expensify hasn't hard-coded yet.


Thanks

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Answers

  • April Bekkala
    April Bekkala Expensify Customer, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 117 Expensify Team

    Hi @rgondo,

    Let me begin here: you're looking to require everyone to enter the check-in/out dates for any hotel stays. This is possible!

    You can require a description based on category. I'm assuming all hotel stays are coded to a category such as "Lodging". Within your Category configuration you can enable the option to "Require Description" - then, provide a description hint.

    Just head to your Categories page in policy settings and click "Edit Rules"

    It would look like this:

    If a user attempts to submit a report without this description added for Lodging expenses they will be prompted to enter that information prior to submitting the report.

    To take it a step further you can then "Strictly Enforce Expense Policy Rules" in Domain Control for specific Domain Groups. This will restrict the user from having the ability to submit the report if they have not entered that information.

    To enable this head to your Domain Groups page and click "Edit" for their group and enable "Strictly enforce expense policy rules".

    You can learn more about managing your Domain Groups here.

  • rgondo
    rgondo Expensify Customer Posts: 31 Expensify Admirer

    Hi April,


    Yes thanks I am already using that setting. However that just makes the text field required, which is just a free text form. It is not in a date-format. So often times people will just enter "Hotel in Austin for meetings", for example.


    As a free-text field, this does not help very much since people can enter whatever they want. A date field (checkin/checkout) option would be great. Similarly, we have company vehicles and require odometer reading with each gas receipt. Again, a required free-text field is not helpful, nor does it help when exporting the data - none of it is pivotable; I have to go in and clean up all the rows.


    Benefits of Date and Numberical formats: Data can be pivoted. For example, using this I can count the total number of hotel nights by employee to help manage our hotel spend. For mileage, I can use formulas to automatically calculate our fuel use and MPG calculations.


    Thanks

  • Conor Pendergrast
    Conor Pendergrast Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 175 Expensify Team

    Thanks @rgondo - that's great! To get a little more details in case it helps, what ways specifically would that date format field help your managers to determine whether to approve or reject a particular expense? Are you having them look at the total expense amount, divide it by the amount of nights in the stay, to manually work out a cost per-night, and compare that to a limit you can't spend above?

  • rgondo
    rgondo Expensify Customer Posts: 31 Expensify Admirer

    Hi @Conor Pendergrast ,


    Yes, we are looking at cost-per-night. Also looking at total nights to get a better sense of our travel time. This helps us understand how many nights away a particular employee or team is spending. We don't have a hard limit on cost per night, but we do try to compare across teams to see if they are truly booking the most economical option.


    More than anything, the dates help us tie the expense to the specific event they are travelling for. If the smartscan function could pick up checkin/out dates from the folio, that would be the best scenario.

    Also, having a number-format field for entering Odometer readings - similar use case; so we can track our driver's MPG and mileage.


    Thanks

  • Nicole Trepanier
    Nicole Trepanier Expensify Team Posts: 498 Expensify Team

    Hi @rgondo! This sounds like it would be a great addition to our “Ideas” category to share your feature request. After you do, other Expensify users will be able to vote on the idea and we can gauge the demand for it.

    The most popular ideas will be reviewed by our team and have a real chance of being placed on our roadmap.

  • rgondo
    rgondo Expensify Customer Posts: 31 Expensify Admirer

    Thank you - do I need to add this or is it something admin has to do?

  • Jeremy Boniface
    Jeremy Boniface Expensify Team Posts: 202 Expensify Team

    Anyone can post an Idea -- just head over to this link and click New Idea on the right!