Skip to main content

I’m wondering if anyone on here has experience with using the Employee Expense function in IFS Cloud and what are the pros/cons of it? My company is currently using a third party employee expense reporting platform and we have to manually enter each individual expense report into IFS for payment once it is reviewed and approved by their manager. Hoping we can streamline this to save time as we are a growing company each year.

Some questions that I have related to the Employee Expense function include:

  1. Would employees that need to submit an expense report have an exclusive login that is directly for the Employee Expense function ONLY or would they need regular access to IFS Cloud to get in and submit expenses? Not all of our employees have a need that they require access to our ERP system.
  2. How does the submission of travel receipts work (i.e. airfare tickets, meals from restaurants, hotel, etc.)? Are employees able to attach images to their expense reports?
  3. Is there a multi-level approval hierarchy we are able to set-up so managers are able to review and approve the expense reports before they reach accounting/finance for payment?
  4. How does coding of the expense reports work? We always have a General Ledger account, department, sometimes a Product Code and a Type associated with travel expenses.

Please share what your experience(s) have been! I’m curious how this works!

Thank you!!

I’ll answer what I can.

 

1.) Not sure. All of our users that use the module have IFS accounts, so I have never looked into this myself. 

2.) The short answer is yes. There is some setup involved, but documents can be attached to the expense report record to either the header or the footer. The mobile app will also push the attached documents to IFS.

3.) Yes. The security is fairly robust. Our managers approve the expense report first, then a notification/e-mail is sent to accounting to authorize the expense report and enter.  

4.) There are many options here. The coding is controlled by the posting rules, like everything in IFS but it is possible to setup the rules so that expense accounts are automatically posted to, along with the department.  At our company, expense accounts/cost centers are debited and a liability account credited when every expense report is authorized. AP then just enters the expense report direct to the liability account, without having to code it. I think it would be possible to fully automate the process but would require a business event.

 

As far as the user experience, on the Cloud version I haven’t heard many complaints. But on IEE, I would often hear how it is “harder” that some of the third party expense reporting software on the market. Which, it probably is. But… It is not rocket science either.

Like Time reporting, Expense sheets do not have to have a user associated with them.  It is possible to enter an Expense sheet for an employee record that does not have an associated user.

 

Terms & ConditionsCookie settingsAccessibility statement