How To: Track and report on Fringe Benefits Tax (FBT)
If you’re looking to track and report expense data to calculate FBT, you can use Expensify’s special workflow that allows you to capture extra information and use a template to export to a spreadsheet.
Setup Steps
Add Attendee Count Tags
First, you’ll need to add two tags to your Policy:
1) Number of Internal Attendees
2) Number of External Attendees
These tags must be named exactly as written above, ensuring there are no extra spaces at the beginning or at the end. You’ll need to set the tags from numbers 00 - 10 or whatever number you wish to go up to (up to the maximum number of attendees you would expect at any one time). These tags can be added in addition to those that are pulled in from your accounting solution. Follow these instructions to add tags.
Add Payroll Code
Go to Settings > Policies > Group > [Select Policy] > Categories and within the categories you wish to track FBT against, select Edit Category and add the code ‘TAG’:
Enable Workflow
Once you’ve added the two tags (Internal Attendees and External Attendees) and added the payroll code ‘TAG’ to FBT categories, you can now contact Expensify at [email protected] and send through a request to enable the FBT workflow. Please send through the following request:
‘Can you please add the custom workflow/DEW named FRINGE_BENEFIT_TAX to my company policy named <insert your company policy name> ?’
Once the FBT workflow is enabled, it will require anything with the code ’TAG’ to include the two attendee count tags in order to be submitted.
For Users
Once these steps are completed, users who create expenses coded with any category that has the payroll code ‘TAG’ (e.g. Entertainment Expenses) but don’t add the internal and external attendee counts, will not be able to submit their expenses.
For Admins
You are now able to create and run a report, which shows all expenses under these categories and also shows the number of internal and external attendees. Because we don’t presume to know all of the data points you wish to capture, you’ll need to create a Custom CSV export.
Here’s an example of the Excel formulas to use to report on attendees:
{expense:tag:ntag-1} outputs the first tag the user chooses.
{expense:tag:ntag-3} outputs the third tag the user chooses.
Your expenses may have multiple levels of coding, i.e.:
- GL Code (Category)
- Department (Tag 1)
- Location (Tag 2)
- Number of Internal Attendees (Tag 3)
- Number of External Attendees (Tag 4)
In the above case, you’ll want to use {expense:tag:ntag-3} and {expense:tag:ntag-4} as formulas to report on the number of internal and external attendees.
Our article Export Custom Reports shows you how to create a custom CSV.
Video
For more guidance, check out our video:
(NB: Help Docs have changed since this video was made and are linked below!)
Note: With the NetSuite connection enabled, multi-level tagging is not available.
RELATED ARTICLES:
- How-to: Set up and add single tags
- How-to: Create a custom export
- How-to: Enable Tax Tracking
- How To: Apply simple tax to expenses
- How-to: Export tax
- How-to: Apply complex tax to expenses
- Deep Dive: Understanding custom export templates and formulas
