Xero Integration & Policy Rules
Good afternoon, we're currently looking at integrating Expensify for our day to day employee expenses that the company covers instead of the semi-archaic system used at the moment and had a few questions.
Firstly; how long does the typical SmartScan take? I've tested about 5 different types of receipts today whilst they're all still just scanning, this has been going for just over 5 hours now.
Secondly; when importing transactions into Xero from Expensify, will the expenses be able to pick up our accounting codes or will we have to manually check each transaction?
Thirdly; we are only using it for employee reimbursement, will all scans they do be able to be bundled into one expense against them in Xero? (The transactions all enter Xero as one bill, or multiple bills against the employee to be reimbursed?)
Lastly; Mileage reimbursement's are tax free, whilst all other transactions will have a gst component we will have to account for, is there a way so that all Mileage claims are recognized tax free and all other transactions have their tax component calculated? Or will Xero be able to handle this with the accounting codes?
I'll continue checking around the forums if some of these have already been answered.
Thanks.
Answers
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Rachael Hopkins Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 904 Expensify TeamOptionsHi @SimonN Welcome to the Expensify Community!
SmartScan goes through a few different levels of scanning and checking depending on how complex the needs are, and we value accuracy over speed. It can also take longer depending on volume, some people still save up a month's worth of expenses and scan them at once! With Expensify, the best workflow is to snap the receipt when you get it, put your phone away, then before your report is due for submission, do a quick check to make sure everything is hunky dory. You may in past have collected everything up and then had a punishing end of month process, now you just snap and forget, and automate as much as possible!
When you connect to Xero, your chart of accounts will import into Expensify as Categories. You simply categorise each expense and then submit. You can do two things to automate the categorisation: 1. You can utilise the MCC codes from the credit card company and map them to specific categories under Admin > [Policy Name] > Categories and/or 2. Your users can create expense rules under Account Settings > Expense Rules to dictate which Merchant is coded with what. e.g. you might say anything containing 'WSL' is coded 'Stationery'.
You may also want to use Expensify for non-reimbursable company cards, in fact I think that's almost more useful than the non-reimbursables. You can assign a company card right back to a user's card account in Xero. But this will only be useful if you are using corporate credit cards.
You can have a mix of reimbursable and non-reimbursable expenses on one report. The reimbursables will create one Bill per report. You can also have billable expenses which raise a bill for your client.
Your tax codes will import from Xero also, but mileage expenses do not have a tax component.
I'm in NZ too, and I'm reasonably familiar with Xero, so feel free to ask for clarification! There's no such thing as a silly question.
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Thanks for the helpful answer!
We're trying to get away from corporate credit cards as much as possible and Expensify is one avenue for this.We want to use this entirely for reimbursing employees on fees which may arise on the job or while travelling.
How does the bill itself get pushed into Xero for reimbursement?
Currently we have a supplier set up for the employee currently and just enter it and add it to a batch like any normal bill, will we be able to do the same?
(Create a batch of expenses in Expensify, this gets pushed into the "Supplier" as a bill/reimburse to the employee) -
Rachael Hopkins Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 904 Expensify TeamOptions
Hi @SimonN - sorry for the delay, I missed your reply somehow!
When you set up the Xero connection, you will have one export type for Reimbursable expenses and another for Non-reimbursables.
Reimbursable will export through to Xero as Bills, raised against the staff member, I assume this will be the same as you do currently.
The export can happen automatically when the report is final approved, if you set Auto Sync on the connection. Otherwise it will happen when a Pollicy admin manually goes into the report and clicks 'Export to Xero'.
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I literally want to attach receipts/invoices to transactions within Xero for audit purposes - just like Receipt Bank does/did.
Can i do this with expensify?
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@Spectrum_IO While we do send a PDF of the entire report, we don't attach individual receipts to each transaction.
