I’ve opened this request before. I’d really appreciate matching rules similar to the bank rules, but for expense claims.
I’m importing excel files in expense claims, and it’s grunt work to open every transaction separately and to the repetitive and error pronoe thing over and over again in a new browser window. It’s a total waste of time and effort.
The previous “suggestion” to simple alter the to-be-imported excel/csv for batch creation makes no sense.
I’d have to keep syncing GUID for Accounts, Employees, the VAT rates and recreate a matching ‘engine’. So basically the full functionality of the Manager bank rules.
This functionality is already in Manager but at the bank transaction level. Following that advise, I’d have to do the same for bank transactions.
Hi @joris_manager,
Before going into much detail, I was wondering about your use of Expense Claims.
It seems like each Expense Claim of yours can be classified as a whole based on its Description, right?
I prepare excel files based on copy/pasted files (csv select certain rows from an export from creditcard, manual entries, etc). Those go in manager as expense claims. The Employee GUID is prepared, as that’s easy to do and it’s very clear who is claiming what.
But then, every claim needs to be filed based on its Description (that’s the only thing I have, besides the actual receipts of course).
For example restaurants / hotel, or some supscriptions paid by an employee are either actual recurring or common rows. Hundreds of rows each quarter of the same thing is pain stupid imo. I also need to check for every expense where / how it was invoiced and getting the VAT rate right, making it even worse.
I don’t give access to manager / expense claims to any employee directly, and they shouldn’t fill out any account / vat anyway. That’d be a different workflow and quite frankly a totally different system than Manager.
I’m asking this because I need to know whether you want classification of:
- Entire expense claim to a single account,
Or
- Each individual line of the expense claim to its own account
Because in case of scenario (1), you don’t need to use Expense Claims at all, especially since it’s not filled by the Employees. You can simply treat this as a Bank and Cash Account.
This way, you simply import your spreadsheet as a statement after being paid out and Bank Rules would take care of the rest
In scenario (2), on the other hand, you can use Non-inventory Items to simplify your classification process.
Each expense claim will have to be put on a different account (sometimes things are being paid from a private account). I know it’s not ideal, but it happens.
I understand I can use bank statements + special accounts to map them under an employee. It might be easier right now, but the expense claims are linked to the employee which is kind of nice. Otherwise I’d have to create a bank account for each employee.
I’m not sure why work arounds are advised for this. The normal expense claim has the exact same workflow as bank transactions.
I don’t see now non-inventory items would cover any of this. It would only confuse people at a later stage
I’m not sure if I agree with this being a workaround, since as I understand, the intended process is to allow Employees to make their own Expense Claims and use Non-inventory Items to aid with classifying lines. This will offload the responsibility from the business admin to expense claim payers.
I know that there is a User Permissions issue that makes some users reluctant to give access to their Employee – such as in your case – which is completely understandable.
Personally, I agree that administrator should be able to restrict certain users to a single expense claim payer account.
That said, I see a problem with this suggestion and that is that, unlike imported bank transactions which are a single line each, Expense claims can and usually do have multiple lines and unfortunately, Manager has no utility to do that.
Can we take a step back and look at the source of the issue as I see it? Namely: