International travel

Holger
Holger Expensify Customer Posts: 4

How can i add international travel expenses?

Adding the credit card exchange rate!?

Adding the credit card processing fee?

Right now i can only see its being setup for domestic travel ....

Answers

  • Sophie_Pinto
    Sophie_Pinto Expensify Customer, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 133 Expensify Team

    Hi @Holger

    Hmm, I suggest you write into concierge@expensify.com or call one of the guides from your inbox task, so that we can get a little clearer on what it is you're working with. To start, some of these resources might help you:

    You can use our regular expense management feature to upload your travel expense or you can use our Per Diem feature. This is because we don't necessarily make the same distinction between travel and domestic expenses - this is where your tags and/or categories could come into play.

    You will need to add any credit card fees yourself, unless they are already imported with your credit card when it's connected (check out this article on currency conversion).

    Lastly, you might want to check out our Day 1 for submitters for a quick grounding.

    Hope that helps - let me know if you have any questions.

  • Holger
    Holger Expensify Customer Posts: 4

    Hi,

    thank you for your fast reply.

    I tried the concierge feature but honestly that was not helpful.

    I also don't see a reason why i need to add credit card fees separately (also different exchange rates which are used sometimes by the credit card company due to time differences). That creates a huge pile of extra work and is very inconvenient. I have never seen that before. It needs to be in one expense .... original bill plus extra cost / fees. I don't get why that is not possible. Right now its clearly not for international travel ......

    But I will dig into the links too which you provided.

    Thank you :)

  • Sonia Liapounova
    Sonia Liapounova Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team Posts: 211 Expensify Team

    Hi @Holger

    If you're importing expenses from your bank card then how the international fees are imported depends completely on how your bank processes them. We simply receive the expense data, we do not split, merge, or edit it in any way. So if you have a connected card importing transaction fees separately from the transactions themselves, then that must be how the bank is sending them to us. Unfortunately, we don't have the ability to edit how the bank sends us data.

    From personal experience, I used to have a credit card with a bank that separately processed the transaction and the conversion fee. I found it pretty inconvenient to have the separate transactions (not to mention I didn't want to pay the conversion fee) so I switched banks. My current card is a travel card so my bank doesn't charge me conversion fees. If you travel a lot then it may be a good idea to invest in a card that works better for your purposes.

  • Holger
    Holger Expensify Customer Posts: 4

    Hi,

    thank you too for the response!

    I don't want to add my credit card to expensify. I want to add the charges manually and then upload the credit card bill, all in one expense.

    There is an expense and the corresponding credit card charge. So i want to have one expense where i can upload multiple bills and have that together. Simple as that ....

    Now i am told that i need to create an extra expense for the credit card fee etc. Which i think is not logical and just a matter of programing the software.

    Another example is a hotel stay in a foreign country:

    • 10 days with breakfast would create 20 expenses .... 10 nights and 10 times breakfast
    • since expensify calculates then each day with a new exchange rate i need to create a list and add all different charges together to see the difference to the credit card bill. its crazy

    I am using my American Express card, which is a perfect card for international travel. But again it does not change the underlaying issues with the limited expensify software .....

    Still, really thank you for your reply :)

  • Sonia Liapounova
    Sonia Liapounova Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team Posts: 211 Expensify Team

    Hi @Holger

    Sorry if we came off sounding like we're telling you how you should be reporting your expenses, if you're manually entering expenses then you can enter them any way you'd like.

    • If you're SmartScanning receipts, then we'll enter the amount on the receipt into your account. If the receipt amount doesn't have the credit card fee, then you can add it in one of two ways. You can either edit the amount on the expense created from the SmartScanned receipt, or create a new manual expense to be separate from the SmartScanned receipt.
    • I realize you don't currently have a connected card, but I just want to mention that if you were to be importing from a card, then the fees will import automatically based on how your bank processes them.

    At the moment these are the two available options

  • Holger
    Holger Expensify Customer Posts: 4

    Hi Sonia,

    don't worry .... you have been very nice :) and I appreciate your response.

    I will figure it out somehow. I don't want to add my credit card as the two I use for business, I use also for private purchases and I don't want to open all that up to a company. Plus I think, that could be done much easier without collecting the credit card info from all the people. All the systems I used before did that. But OK ... I see the business behind.

    So, yes I am honestly not very convinced by expensify, but that is my personal opinion :)

    Thank you again and have a great day.