Introduction
As an admin, it's not easy for you to follow up with all your employees for their expense reports. While adding expenses can be done in a jiffy, employees can forget about creating and submitting expense reports.
When you are approaching the deadline to close the books, it becomes hard to ask multiple employees to submit their expense reports at the same time. To solve this, you can set up schedules for the automatic submission of expense reports.
Your employees can add receipts and fill in the mandatory fields, and Sage Expense Management takes care of creating and submission of the expense reports for approval.
Select your desired Grouping Method
You can choose how expenses should be grouped when reports are automatically created and submitted.
Go to Admin Settings > Workflows > Expense Reports.
Under Grouping Method, you will see No Grouping selected by default. Click Edit to change this and choose a different grouping method.
Below is a short description of the available grouping methods.
No Grouping: All complete expenses will be added to a single draft report, and the report will be automatically submitted on the scheduled submission date.
Group by Payment Mode: Complete expenses will be added to reports grouped by the coded payment mode.
For example, if there are 10 complete expenses, with 5 coded to Personal Card/Cash and 5 coded to Corporate Credit Card, Sage Expense Management will create two reports on the submission date. One report will include the 5 Personal Card/Cash expenses, and the other will include the 5 Corporate Credit Card expenses.
Advanced Grouping: Complete expenses will be grouped by a coded dimension (Project or Cost Center).
For example, if there are 10 complete expenses, with 5 coded to Project A, 3 coded to Project B, and 2 coded to Project C, and Project is selected as the Advanced Grouping dimension, Sage Expense Management will create 3 reports, one for each project, with the corresponding expenses added.
You can also choose to group expenses further by Payment Mode. In this case, the first level of grouping will be by the chosen dimension (Project or Cost Center), and the second level of grouping will be by Payment Mode.
For example, if there are 10 complete expenses coded to Project A, with 5 from Corporate Credit Card and 5 from Personal Card/Cash, and 10 complete expenses coded to Project B, all from Personal Card/Cash, Sage Expense Management will create 3 reports. Two reports will be created for Project A, one for Corporate Credit Card and one for Personal Card/Cash. One report will be created for Project B since there is only one payment mode across all complete expenses.
Note: By default, No grouping will be selected unless you decide to edit and apply your desired grouping method.
Set up Automatic Report Submission
Go to Admin Settings > Workflows > Expense Reports section.
Click on Add Schedule to add an Auto-submission schedule.
Select the Schedule Type, i.e., the frequency of the schedule. You can select Weekly or Monthly.
After selecting the schedule type, you can select the days of the week (Weekly schedule) or dates of the month (Monthly schedule)
On the next screen, select the date(s) for the auto-submission of expense reports. For the dates after the 27th, please select "Last Day."
Click on Complete Schedule to create the automated report submission schedule. Note: You can add multiple dates for submission in the same schedule (up to 4).
After creating the schedule, you can see the details of the schedule and also can edit it.
What happens after a schedule is created?
Whenever the Automated Report Submission schedule runs, for each employee:
All Draft Reports will be auto-submitted for approval.
Sage Expense Management creates a new expense reports with Complete expenses (all mandatory fields filled on expense) based on the the Grouping Method selected and submits the expense report for approval.
Email reminders to your employees
As you create an automated schedule for report submission, Sage Expense Management sends an email reminder asking your employees to complete the expenses two days before the scheduled date.
If you schedule report submission for the 15th of every month, Sage Expense Management sends an automated reminder email on the 13th of every month, to all employees that have any incomplete expenses present in their account.
Notes
Sage Expense Management only submits all Complete expenses, which means all the expenses with mandatory fields filled and receipts attached (based on your organization's policies). If the expenses are in Incomplete State, those expenses won't be submitted.
If your organization has receipt-mandatory policies for expenses, i.e., expenses without receipts will be flagged. Then the expenses without receipts will be excluded from auto-submission. Those expenses won’t be submitted automatically.
The automated reminder for Unreported Expenses won't be functional after you create a schedule for your entire organization. If you delete all automated report submission schedules, you will have to add an automated reminder for Unreported Expenses if it is needed.
Sage Expense Management allows users to manually add expenses to reports that are automatically submitted. As a result, some reports may contain user-added expenses even if they were grouped at the time of submission. Admins and approvers will see a message in the report if it contains expenses after it was submitted.
Expenses which cannot be grouped will be added to a single draft report and submitted for approval.