Introduction to merchant based expense rules
As an admin, you can create smart expense rules to automatically fill expense values based on the merchant of the expense. For example, if the merchant is Starbucks, you can configure a rule to automatically set the category as Food. If the merchant is Fyle, you can automatically set the category to Software Subscriptions.
Setting up these rules eliminates the need for your employees to fill up expenses, and ensures that all expenses are correctly coded. We strongly recommend setting up expense rules for your most common merchants.
Creating expense rules
To create a new expense rule,
Go to Admin Settings > Expenses > Expense Rules.
Click on Add Expense Rule.
Step 1: If
Enter the characters present in the merchant name. This could be the entire merchant name or a subset of the merchant name. For example, if you enter "Amazon", it will match with all merchants containing this string including "Amazon US", "Amazon Services" and "Amazon".
Step 2: Then Set
Set the fields you want to set based on the merchant name. This could be Category, Project, Cost Center or any other custom fields.
Step 3: Apply this rule to
Choose whether the rule is applied to all employees or only specific departments.
What happens after an expense rule is created?
Once an expense rule is created, it will be applied on all future expenses. Previously created expenses will not be automatically completed because of the rule.
Whenever a matching merchant is found for an expense rule, the fields on that expense will be automatically coded as per the expense rule.
Tips & tricks for using expense rules
You can use expense rules to clean up raw merchant names you receive from the card feed, by including Merchant as one of the fields you set using an expense rule.
For example: If merchant contains "HomeDepotOfficial" set merchant to "Home Depot".
You can account for variation in merchant names while setting up an expense rule using "%", where % is a flexible placeholder for any characters. For example, "G%Suite" will match with "G Ads Suite", "Google 123 Suite" and any other merchant name containing more letters between "G" and "Suite".
Avoid duplicate or conflicting rules. If case any conflicting rules are found, Fyle applies the most recently created rule.
For example:
Rule 1: If merchant contains "Uber" set category to "Taxi"
Rule 2: If merchant contains "Uber" set category to "Travel"
Fyle will apply the rule which was created most recently in the system.