Company preferences should not be overwritten by individual preferences.

Svillanueva
Svillanueva Expensify Customer Posts: 16 Expensify Newcomer

I have found that if we turn off the "Scheduled Submit" report feature for the people in our company policy, each individual has to turn it off as well in their individual policy if we no longer want people using this feature. It has caused us a lot of headaches and I think it would make sense that company settings should overwrite personal settings as long as those expenses fall under that company policy.

It would be nice if you could update this so I don't have to tell every new employee that we hire to turn off the "Scheduled Submit feature, e-receipts, etc."

Answers

  • Kadie Alexander
    Kadie Alexander Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team Posts: 113 Expensify Team

    Hi @Svillanueva! Thanks for posting in the Expensify Community.

    You can always create an expense without a receipt. To do this, manually click the New Expense dropdown on the Expenses page, choose your expense type, and select Manually Create.

    Your Policy Admin may require a receipt for the expense to be submitted, in which case I would speak to them to see if this is a hard-set company rule.

    Let me know if you have any questions!

  • Svillanueva
    Svillanueva Expensify Customer Posts: 16 Expensify Newcomer

    Thanks for your response, but this does not address my concern. I am not asking how to create a new expense.

  • Michael Haxhiu
    Michael Haxhiu Expensify Customer, Expensify Team Posts: 88 Expensify Team

    @Svillanueva Sorry for misunderstanding! It sounds like you are making a feature change request, which would disallow employees from enabling Scheduled Submit at the individual-level. Is that right?

    If so, can you please provide me with some context on how it's caused headache for your team?

    Just to give you some preliminary insight, we allow individual users to enable Scheduled Submit because it's a facilitates the best experience for proactive users and adheres to our best practices. Most user's SmartScan their receipts as soon as they get it, and then they rely on Scheduled Submit to handle the remaining next steps in the expense reporting process (i.e. adding the expense to a report, submitting expenses that abide to policy rules, and highlighting the expenses that don't abide to policy rules for user review).

  • Svillanueva
    Svillanueva Expensify Customer Posts: 16 Expensify Newcomer

    It could be a useful feature but for our company we have to submit reports monthly by the 5th of the following month. What we found that for February expenses, if employees waited until March 5th to submit their expenses which some had to because of pending February transactions, then march transactions were automatically put in their report and submitted with February expenses and we had to reject report and make changes by removing March expenses from their February report. Also, if we added Mileage expenses, the schedule submit added those to the same credit card transaction report and we ask our employees to submit those separately.

    In short, we want employees to have control to create a monthly credit card report and a separate reimbursable report (expenses paid on their personal cards or mileage) and scheduled submit made this messy and people were getting confused.

    Also, I think all expenses that come through our policy should automatically but subject to the policies restrictions, not just when it's put into a report. That is something I think Expensify should change.

  • Michael Haxhiu
    Michael Haxhiu Expensify Customer, Expensify Team Posts: 88 Expensify Team

    @Svillanueva Thanks for the additional context. Overall, it sounds like your team is opting for a workflow in Expensify that's a little more manual than necessary. Why does your team need expenses to be broken down by month? It looks like you have one Group policy where all reports are submitted, so ultimately expenses will export to your accounting system the same way regardless of whether you separate them on separate reports by expense-type or put all expenses in the same report(s).

  • Svillanueva
    Svillanueva Expensify Customer Posts: 16 Expensify Newcomer

    Our employees have to categorize all of their expenses which helps us determine what funds expenses are charged to. We are a nonprofit so we have to send vouchers to donors and these expenses are a very important piece to that. They are grouped monthly so there is one deadline for all employees and for reconciliation purposes in our accounting system.

    Despite the way our org functions I still don't think that individual policies settings should overwrite company policies settings since the expenses are flowing into the company policy.

  • Michael Haxhiu
    Michael Haxhiu Expensify Customer, Expensify Team Posts: 88 Expensify Team
    edited April 2021

    @Svillanueva Got it, thanks for the providing the context on how your team is using Expensify. The main reason I'm inquiring is to see if we can improve the efficiency of your set up by having you enable Scheduled Submit with a monthly frequency.

    But it sounds like you tried this and didn't like the fact that expenses from another month were included (e.g. March expenses added to the employee's February report). For most customers this isn't a problem, as you can export those expenses into QBD and they'll carry the correct expense data. Basically, any approved expenses can be exported to your accounting system. And if you are looking to filter expense data in Expensify by date ranges or expense types, that's a possibility using our search filters or export templates. For example, you can set see expenses from date X - Y for CC spend, reimbursable, mileage, etc.

    I understand your feature request and will leave it here for other members of the community to contribute toward.

  • Svillanueva
    Svillanueva Expensify Customer Posts: 16 Expensify Newcomer
  • Smarsh
    Smarsh Expensify Customer Posts: 3 Expensify Newcomer

    I agree with Svillanueva, it is just terrible that employees can override company preferences that are setup. If the company is paying for the platform and allowing access, they should have the ability to control how employees use that platform.

  • CTEexpensifyuser
    CTEexpensifyuser Expensify Customer Posts: 1

    I agree! We also do monthly reports and only want 1 report per month from employees. We have to constantly reject reports. It is frustrating to have more than 1 report per month from an employee.