A receipt is an undeniable proof of a transaction. For several companies, receipts are not only essential for validating expenditures but also play a pivotal role in claiming tax deductions. In the complex world of financial compliance, ensuring that every expense comes with the requisite receipt is a critical part of the audit process.
This article delves into how to set up policies in Fyle to streamline the process of mandating and managing receipts.
How to set a Policy for mandating Receipt in Fyle
Login to your Fyle web application with your admin credentials, head to Admin settings > Expenses > Policies, and Create a new policy.
2. Suppose you are setting up a policy for mandating receipts. In that case, you can enable the first section in the policy, and Fyle will present all the conditions and actions relevant for mandating a receipt.
3. Next, you can choose if this policy needs to be applied only to specific categories or employees. If this section is left blank, it indicates that the policy applies to all expenses and employees in Fyle.
4. Now, you can choose specific policy conditions such as amount, projects, cost center, etc. For example, if you want to mandate receipts for all expenses submitted, about $100, you can add that as a condition in the amount section, and only if the expense crosses $100 will a receipt will be required. Similarly, you can mandate receipts for specific projects and cost centers, too.
5. Once you have defined all the policy conditions, you can now configure actions to determine what happens when an expense is submitted without a receipt.
There are three possible actions :
a. Flag the expense for approvers and verifiers: When this action is enabled, the users will still be able to add the expenses to report and submit for approval; however, the approvers will see a red flag and can decide whether to approve further or not.
b. Show employees a warning and allow them to add a reason: This action gives a warning to the user while submitting the expense that the expense violates company policy, and they are asked for an explanation before the expense can be submitted; however, again, this does not block the user from adding an expense to a report and submitting it for approval.
Generally, we recommend a combination of actions a and b shared above if you want to avoid enforcing the receipts policy on your employees. This is known as a non-critical policy setup.
However, suppose you want to enforce the policy and ensure that employees must add a receipt to submit expenses. In that case, you can set up the following action, which is known as critical policy.
c. Mark the expense as incomplete: This is a critical policy, and this blocks the expense from being added to a report or being submitted for further approval.
The best practice we recommend is to set up a critical policy if you want to enforce this as a setting for your organization. Once you have selected your preferred action, you can save the policy.
How does the policy work for spenders?
If you have set up a non-critical policy, the spenders will still be able to submit expenses. Still, they will need to share additional explanation, and the approvers and verifiers will see an alert of policy violation when they are reviewing the expense, as shown below :
However, if you have set up a critical policy, two things are expected :
a. If a spender is creating expenses manually, they will not be able to save the expense without adding a receipt; this behaves as a mandatory field and won't let the user continue on the expense journey without a receipt.
b. If the expense is created through integrations such as email forwards or corporate card, feed setup in Fyle, an expense without a receipt will be marked as Incomplete. The spenders would have to edit the expense, add a receipt, and then save it to mark the expense complete and add it to the report or submit it further.
Please write to us at [email protected] if you need any help with this setup.