If you're wondering what merchant-based expense rules are, please get started by reading what they are and how to create one from this help article.
As an admin, if you have created an expense rule to fill the expense details automatically based on the merchant name, please read this article to understand the way we update the expense form and the conditions where the expense rules won't be applied.
How do expense rules work?
When an expense is created by attaching the receipt or from the card transaction automatically, we extract the details like Date of Spend, Amount, and Merchant. If there is an expense rule for that merchant, we check that and apply that rule to the expense form.
For example: Here, we create an expense rule for the following fields:
If
Merchant name contains amaz,
Then Set
Merchant to Amazon.com
Category to Office Supplies
And Apply this rule to Everyone.
Here's how the expense rule is applied:
The expense rules will be applied in the following cases:
When the expense is created by adding the receipt via web app or mobile app, or other apps (Chrome extension, Slack, Outlook, SMS)
When the expense is automatically created from a corporate card transaction via Bank Statement Upload, Direct Feed, or Real-Tme Feed with Visa or Mastercard.
In both cases, we extract the details like Date, Amount, and Merchant Name and check if there are any expense rules for the merchant. If there is an expense rule created, Fyle will apply that rule and automatically fill in the expense details.
Note that expense rules are not applied when a user is editing the expense but are applied in the background after an expense is saved.
You can also see the History of each expense to see the details filled by applying Expense Rules.
When does the expense rule won't be applied?
For the cases mentioned below, the details on the expense form won't be filled in as per the expense rules:
When your employee manually creates an expense by filling in all the details: In this case, the expense rules won't be applied to the expense form because the employee is manually adding the details. The priority is given to the manual editing fields over expense rules.
Restriction of fields for employees: If an employee has a restriction of Projects, Cost Centers, or Categories, and those fields are present on the expense form, then the restricted field won’t be filled by the expense rule. However, the other details will be filled in on the form.
For example, if an expense rule is like this: If Merchant name containsamaz, Then SetMerchant to
Amazon.comCategory to
Office SuppliesIf the
Office Suppliesisn’t allowed to that employee, then the expense rule will fill only the right merchant name and leave the category empty on the matching expenses.
Restriction of custom fields for categories: Similar to the above case, if there is a custom field that isn't allowed to a certain category, then we don't apply that custom field on the expense form.
Restrictions always take precedence over expense rules.Any existing expenses: The expense rules will be applied to the expenses added after creating the rule. No existing expenses on Fyle will be affected due to expense rules.
Note
If you've disabled or modified any field - Project, Category, Cost Center, etc., on your Fyle org, you will need to update the same on the expense rule as well. Fyle doesn't automatically update the fields on the expense rule when they are modified on Organization Settings.
If your organization has Auto-fill enabled, then expense rules will be applied only on the empty fields. The expense rules won't update details filled by auto-fill.
Feel free to reach out to our Support Team at [email protected] for more information about expense rules.