Recording Transcript:

Kate:

They will help you optimize cost so you can implement guardrails to improve employee spend behavior, track expenses by category, and also use your historical data as benchmarks to forecast future costs. And of course, improve your experience, so you can automatically notify employees when you’ve taken an action on their expense report and reimburse your employees on a set schedule which is set up in your expense policy and it can differ by policy too. So as we start to think about how we’re going to set up these policies or if you want to change anything within yours, these are going to be the three things that we really start to think about and how we’re going to use these policies to be able to empower each one of these sections.

Some features that you’ll hear me talk about today, custom policies, customizing categories, approvals of course is one of the biggest topics, what your receipt requirements are, and once again, this can differ by company, by policy, custom fields, so what is going to be very important for your company to be capturing, and then also how we can set up reimbursements. A lot of you are probably familiar with this. If you are newer to TravelBank and this is going to be your first time seeing expense policies, we’ll definitely cover all of these. So let’s go ahead and we can get started.

So when you are in your TravelBank account, we will go to company settings and right into expenses. As an admin, you will have the company settings option here and we will be focusing today on the expense policy, our expense categories, and those custom fields that I mentioned. Under expense policy, everyone will see a default policy. The most important thing to remember about this is all of your employees are going to fall within your default policy unless you move them out to a different policy. So I always suggest thinking about this as your catch-all. You would be comfortable with anybody falling into this policy in case they don’t get moved out quickly or maybe something got missed. So your default policy will just be kind of that blanket one that you would be comfortable with everybody falling within.

We can add in multiple expense policies too, which it seems like a lot of you’re doing. Some of you had more than eight policies today, some had in the four to five range. So if we wanted to add a policy, we’d say just for the marketing department here. The first section we’re going to look at is that receipt requirement. Every company has a different threshold of what they are requiring receipts for. $75 is what we have in here is recommended, but if you are going to require receipts for everything, you would just put in one cent, and anytime somebody submits an expense report, they are going to have to tie that receipt to it.

We also see $25 tends to be a pretty common number that we see in here as well, so just completely depends on your policy. Once again, this can be different by each policy too. So maybe you want to require receipts from everybody in marketing, but if maybe there’s another department that you don’t need to get receipts for every time.

If you do have some road warriors out there taking their own cars, mileage reimbursement rate can be entered. We do just have the IRS rate. When the IRS updates it annually, we will update that on the back end so you don’t have to worry about going through and updating it yourself. Or if you have a custom rate, that can always be entered here as well. We’ll use the multiplier for the mileage rate. When the user goes into their expense report, they’ll put their destination, where they started from. It will save say 25 miles and then we’ll use this multiplier to just calculate how much they should be reimbursed.

The description requirement, I see this, half the companies are turning it on, half are not based on the policy. So when this is turned on, employees are going to be required to add a description for any of their manual expenses. Just note that your mileage expenses are always going to require a description, but this will give them a free form box so they can type in exactly what information, what the expense was for, and then any other information that you might need in here. So you can either turn this on or turn it off. If you are using a corporate card, we want to make sure that this is toggled on, and then as you can see, two more settings pop up.

The first one is requiring merging of the expense with a corporate card transaction. What this means is employees are going to be required to merge their manual corporate card expense with the respective corporate card transaction before they can submit their expense report. This does not apply to refund to the company expenses, mileage, or if you are using TravelBank for travel as well, so say somebody booked a flight through TravelBank since we’re just going to upload that receipt for you and that expense. If you are using travel and expense, that’s not going to require a merge, but if you were to book say a flight on American directly, that would require you to do the merge for it.

That was a very kind of quick answer. So exactly what this means is typically transactions will take anywhere from two to four days to be posted. So if you are out on the road, or one of your users are out there, they go out to lunch, they take a picture of that receipt, get it right in TravelBank right after they sign the check, they would not be able to submit that manual expense until the restaurant transaction comes through in the next two to four days. The reason this is extremely helpful is so people do not submit duplicate expenses. If this is turned off, that employee may submit that expense for the restaurant the day that they eat there, and then in three days the transaction might come through and they might submit that again.

So if you are using a corporate card, we do recommend turning this on just to make sure you are not getting those duplicate expenses and transactions submitted. Biggest thing there though is of course to remind your users that they would need to wait until that transaction comes in the next couple days. Some people of course want to get their expenses in immediately, but just communicating that to them that that’s why they have to wait.

The second corporate card setting is default payment method. So when this is turned on, when people go in to created either a repeat and refund to the company expenses, it will default to the corporate card section. So the corporate card is the payment method so they don’t have to go in and make a switch to personal or whatever that looks like. So this is just helpful to make sure people are selecting the corporate card. If you have people that are doing a mix of reimbursement and corporate card, you might want to turn this off. If it’s mostly corporate card for everything, I recommend leaving it on just to avoid any mistakes.

You can also split department access. So when this is off, employees can only select their assigned department when they’re submitting an expense. If we turn this on, they’re going to be able to split their expenses between different departments. This is our marketing policy in here, maybe somebody from marketing needs to put half of their expense to the marketing team, but the other half to the sales team. So if this is turned on, they would be able to do that. If it’s turned off, they would only be able to put that expense through to the marketing department. Save these settings by clicking continue.

Our next section that pops up here is our category rules. So these categories are all pulling in from the left side here our expense categories. You can create categories by putting in their name and you can either make them enabled or disabled. You can use an external account ID as well, and then if you need to edit anything, you can just click this edit button. If we want to make say the airfare disabled, then it will no longer be visible for people to submit expense reports to. So once these are pulling into our policy, policy name is always required there. We can also disable them based on the policy.

So maybe your marketing team does not get any money towards say cellphones, so we would just disable that. Then the marketing team, when they go to submit expenses, they wouldn’t even see cellular phone as an option to be able to submit an expense to. So anytime you uncheck one of these, it’ll make it inactive only within that one policy. We can also set rules based on the category. So maybe with client entertainment there’s a per expense limit. So if we turn this on, maybe they can only spend a maximum of $1,000 per expense for the client entertainment. This will not stop them from spending that money, but what this is going to do is it will flag to the manager that violations have been made against the policy and then you can have those conversations with the person.

You can also, when it comes to you for submission, if you see that they did have a policy violation there, then you can always reject it. You can leave a comment. So this will at least just give you more visibility into exactly what’s allowed and flag it for you if people have violated it. You can also do a reoccurring spending limit. I see this one really often on back to that example of cell phones. So maybe on a monthly basis they can submit $90 for their cellphone and nothing more than that. You can also do it on a daily, weekly or yearly option. This is also really helpful if you have people going into the office and they’re paying for parking or maybe you do a monthly allowance for people to be able to go to the gym or health centers. This would just make sure that people are following your policy, how much they can spend each month.

By category, you can also require expense splitting. So when this is off, your expense splitting, it’s optional so people can still do it, but when it’s on it is going to require that. So if you do have a category that always needs to go between different departments, you would want to turn this on and people will be required to do so.

Once you get all of your rules set up for the categories within your specific policy, we would go ahead into our approval rules. I see approval rules differ the most out of each section here between policy. So when you set up a policy, this is what you’re first going to see. So this would say all expenses, all expense reports are first getting approved by the employee’s manager and then by the finance team. So that would be anybody within TravelBank that has that finance role. We can edit that if maybe a policy you only want to go to finance or you only want to go to the manager, your finance team doesn’t need to see it. We will leave this one on for manager and finance, but if you have additional policy rules or approval rules, you can do it based on condition.

So what that means is say anything over $5,000 would need to go to Cassie. So anything over $5,000 in this policy would first go to Cassie. If she approves it, it’s then going to go to the employee’s manager and then it will go to finance. We can also do it by category. So say if anything based on job supplies might need to go to Dani. So if an expense report includes the job supply category, it’ll first go to Dani, then the person’s manager and then finance. So as you can see, you can build in a lot of conditional rules in here to be able to route to somebody else and they will always come first and then it’ll start making its way down the chain, whether you want it to go to manager and finance, just manager or just finance.

In the event that Dani might have two conditions in here, so maybe she needs to see anything over $10,000. If something falls within the $10,000 in job supplies, Dani is not going to have to approve this twice, it will still just go to her one time. So you don’t have to worry about if you have one person in here with multiple condition approval rules, they’re not going to have to approve it multiple times. She would just have to do it that one time. Go ahead and save our approval rules.

Then reimbursements. So you can do reimbursements by policy. We would just toggle that on. The benefit of this is you can use multiple bank accounts. So we would just set that up by going into our bank accounts. So maybe your marketing team gets reimbursed from one bank account, your IT team gets reimbursed from a different bank account as they’re buying computers for people. So you can select different bank accounts, and then you can also do different reimbursement schedules. So of course you can have everybody getting reimbursed from the same bank account, all of them on the daily basis.

But if you need to do it differently, you can have some policies on the daily basis, some semi-monthly. So semi-monthly is going to be the first and the 15th of the month and then monthly will be on the first of the month. If you’re not using reimbursements through TravelBank, no worries, you can just turn that right off. But this at least gives you a little bit more freedom to be able to use multiple bank accounts and be able to use different schedules.

As we talked about at first, you will always have everybody fall within your default policy first. So if you do need to move them out, and if we want to move them into this marketing policy, we would be able to just select them from here. So say George Washington’s on our marketing team. We can also search, maybe we need to add Lindsay into this one. So now they’re going to be added into our marketing policy. It’s going to take them out of either the default policy or if they were in another policy. Note that employees can only be in one policy at a time though, so if you do start switching them around, it would take them out of their previous policy.

You can also change their policy directly in the employee directory. So if we needed to change Aaron’s policy, we can click that little pencil icon and be able to select a different policy for him here. The other way that if you need to change them in bulk, you can also import. So all you would do is you would just download the CSV. There are some help articles here that’d be able to help you. But if you’ve uploaded a big spreadsheet and you’re changing around departments, it would just override what is currently in there. But if you are just changing one or a couple people’s departments, I recommend doing it just directly on their profile here or doing it directly within the policy.

So that’s how you can start creating multiple policies. If you need to delete one, just click delete, and then once you delete them, anybody that’s within this policy is going to jump back into your default policy. So once again, just making sure that that default policy is going to be your catch-all. So if something does get deleted, changed, it’ll move them into one that you’re comfortable with.

We touched on the expense categories and how those are flowing into and impacting our policy. The custom fields is also something that you want to make sure you are setting up as well. So the custom fields, employees will see when they’re submitting expenses. You can add a field name and you can either make it a dropdown or an open field. If you do a dropdown at the bottom here is when you can start adding in your values. So if they select a client, they would start getting the dropdown options here to be able to select what client the expense is for. You can enable and disable them. You can make them required or you can make them optional.

Then one very helpful thing here is making it category specific. So maybe when people select the client entertainment category is when they have to select the client name. If they don’t select that category, then this custom field is not going to populate. So this is one way just to get more information based on exactly what they are selecting their expense for. Then like I said, you can also just leave it an open field. People will be able to go in and type whatever it is that they want to.

Once you do add in your custom fields, just note that the field name cannot be changed after creation. The reason for this is just to make sure your historical data and reporting stays exactly as it should. So if you do need to make any changes, you could always just disable this cost center and then we could add in a new custom field there. But just note, once you have created that name, you can not go back and edit it.

So that is everything that we’re going to cover today on our expense policies. I will go ahead, and if there are any questions, you can type those directly into the Q&A. As we mentioned on the top of the call, this is recorded so we will make sure that you all get the recording out so you can always reference back to this. But if you do have additional questions too, our support frequently asked questions in the bottom left-hand corner is extremely helpful. You can type in exactly what you’re searching for and be able to get some answers on the expense policies.

Of course if you have any questions for our product support team, you can click the chat with us and you can send them over a message. Just let them know that you need to get over to product support and our fantastic product support team will be able to answer any functional questions. If you’re running into any challenges, let them know and they’ll be able to help you out.

So we have one question here. Can we reimburse employees directly from TravelBank to their respective bank account? Yes, absolutely. So once you set up reimbursements, and like I said, you can do that by policy, your users need to go into their own account under expense management and then they will just sync their reimbursement account. So once their expense report is approved, say we needed to reimburse them $200, it will go directly into their bank account. On the company level, as you saw, you’ll be able to set up your company bank account and it will come straight from there, go right to your employee. So you don’t have to do any of that paperwork or cutting checks outside. TravelBank handle it for you.

So say an employee used the corporate card for a personal purchase, is there a way to take money from them? Yes and no. So we cannot pull money out of the employee’s bank account. So if they are submitting for reimbursement, I’m going to actually just pull up a… We’ll make a expense here. So if they are submitting for reimbursement and they got a refund or whatever it may be, so say that they paid for an item $200 and then they had to return it so then they got that refund and you had already paid them out for their reimbursement, they can go in here and do refund to company.

Say they bought something at Best Buy for $200, a gift, so they would submit this. So we can create an expense here. If they’re also submitting another reimbursable expense, so say they bought something, they just went out to lunch, a team lunch, and they submitted an expense report for $300 for this lunch. What the system will do when they’re submitting this expense report is we will say reimbursement, since they would need to be refunded $300 for the lunch, but you also need to take $200 from them, we are only going to reimburse them $100. So we’ll be able to deal with that delta for you.

If they are only submitting for reimbursement for say $100, but they owed the company $200, you would need to deal with that outside of TravelBank. We can help with it if the reimbursement amount is higher than the refund amount but it’s a very common use case that we see a lot. So at least it helps that the user would… You don’t have to deal with too much on your side. The user is able to just get the difference amount directly through TravelBank. But like I said, if they’re either not submitting for reimbursement or if the reimbursement is lower than what the refund amount is, you would need to deal with that outside of TravelBank.

It seems like somebody else had that question too. So glad we can… It seems like a very popular one. We do have a really helpful support article as well on the refund to company. So if you do have some questions, this will walk you exactly through how to do it. But just the biggest thing is we cannot actually take money from your employee’s bank accounts. If there’s any other questions too, I’ll be hanging around for a little bit longer to answer any questions. But want to make sure you have all the contact information that you might need.

So if you do have, like I said, if you do have questions, you can always email success@travelbank.com. You can go to support.travelbank.com to see those frequently asked questions, or you can email support@travelbank for any questions. I also showed you how you can chat into them. Product updates, we always want you to know what’s new, so travelbank.com/whats-new is where you’ll be able to see that. You will be getting emails too as we do get the new releases out, but that will be a really good website for you to bookmark just to be able to always see what’s going on.

It does look like we have another question. So if our policy is set for a $60 meal allowance, can we set that up to flag when they submit over that? Yeah, so that’s when you would start using the category rules. Let’s jump into the categories again, definitely easier to. So if we go back into our marketing policy, category rules. So if we start to set rules, that’s when you can do the spending limit. So on daily it was $60, that’s how we would do that. So this would set up a flag so you’d be able to see the violations that are being made. Like I said, it doesn’t stop people from spending, but it will flag it for you.

Then you can also do it on the per expense limit too. So I know meals of course is a little bit different since there’ll be three of them a day, but if there is an instance where maybe it’s just a specific dinner or something like that, if you break it out between breakfast, lunch and dinner, you can make three different expense categories and say for breakfast they can do $15, lunch $15 and break it up that way if you would like as well.

Is there a way to export our expense policies into a document so we can view them all together? Right now we cannot do that. So it sounds like you would want to be able to download each one of these and be able to see exactly what your general rules are. So say the marketing one has the one cent receipt requirement, but maybe another policy is $25. We don’t have a way to download that right now, so you would just need to go in and check them out individually like we’ve been doing. I can definitely submit this to our product team though as a feature request, because I can see how that would be helpful. That just any feature request that you all have, we would love to hear them too.

We have a couple more questions here too. What would you say is the best step-by-step of doing a corporate expense? First, take the picture of the receipt. Second, code everything. Third, merge the posted expense when it appears. Or should they wait to code it until the posted expense appears? I’ve had some team members claim that when they code it first, then merge it after it’s posted, all of their coding disappears and they have to start over. There’s two ways to do this. So yes, you’re spot on with take a picture of the receipt, upload it and code everything, and then merge it once the posted expense comes in. As long as that posted expense, the amount matches, the date matches, the merchant matches, it will merge.

Definitely, if you want to send an email over to success@travelbank.com and let me know what team members you’ve heard from that the coding disappears, I would love to look into that a little bit more. So that’s a really good way for the people that want to just get that receipt in immediately. They want to take the picture and then just delete the email or throw the receipt away. So I recommend them doing it right away. For the other people that maybe every Friday they do their expenses and they have everything posted, they can just go directly into the transaction that’s been posted and put in all the coding. They don’t have to worry about the merging.

So it’s really dependent on how you want your users to function. If you have the merge requirement turned on, people cannot submit, of course, until that transaction comes in. So I do see a lot of people just waiting until the transaction comes in, they’ll upload the receipt and do it that way. But like I said, the people that are merging are typically the ones that just like to take the picture and get it in their app immediately, and definitely got to love those people for getting everything done very quickly and you’re not waiting around for their expenses.

Yeah. So for the merge, you want to make sure that the merchant, the date and the amount is correct. If it’s not correct, you’ll see a flag pop up saying there wasn’t a match, was it one of these expenses, and you can edit it. But of course, it just helps to make sure that everything’s ready from that first expense creation to the transaction, so it just makes the merge a little bit quicker.

Are we able to create rules for reoccurring charges so that they automatically populate the category and department based on the merchant name? Right now, for reoccurring charges, we wouldn’t be able to do it on the category level, but what I would recommend… Let’s go ahead and create an expense real quick. Because we can create expenses based on reoccurring charges. So kind of back to that cellphone example that I’ve been using, we have clients that go in and say on a monthly basis they get charged from Verizon $90 and they selected the day that the charge comes in, so we did a repeat expense here.

So say on monthly basis, Verizon charges me on the 25th of every month for $90, oops, not 900. I’d be able to select the category. I’ll just select software for this one and then put in the appropriate information. I can add the receipt in there too. So then what this does is on the 25th of every month, it’s going to send me an email saying your repeat expense has been created. It’s already going to have all this information for me, so I just need to go in and tie it to an expense report. So this just helps the end user not have to do the same thing every single month. If you do select the 30th or the 31st of the month, it will automatically just default to the last day of the month, so one little tip there.

Yeah, so it sounds like it would be helpful downloading policies into a PDF. So yeah, I definitely can submit that to our product team. But like I said, keep those suggestions coming if there’s anything that would be helpful for you. You all have had a lot of really good questions today, so definitely keep them coming. I’ll stay on for a little bit longer too. Does a repeat expense have to be the same amount or can you edit it each month? So when you do get the email saying, “Hey, the Verizon charge, your repeat expense is going to be coming in,” when you click on that email, it’s going to bring you into the expense like this. So you can edit that amount before you submit it, since you do still manually have to add it into an expense report. So you would be able to go in and do that.

Yep. So the email as well for the split between departments. Yeah, I’ll definitely reach out to you as well, get a little bit more information about what’s going to be helpful for you all. Sorry, just making sure I have everybody’s names down here so we can reach out to the right person. Then what about missing receipt affidavit? So if you want to leave another comment there of exactly what you’d be looking for. So based on kind of your receipt requirement too.

The expense requires a receipt based on the amount, but the person doesn’t have one, it’s lost, it’s gone. How would you suggest that that be treated? So I’ve seen people do this in a couple different ways. So it will really depend on your company’s policies. So if they’re submitting an expense for a lunch, they threw away that receipt. It’s not very easy to just call a restaurant and say, “Hey, I need a copy of the receipt,” like you could do with an Amazon purchase. So what I have seen companies do is they might have a blanket PDF file that will say receipt lost, have the employee sign their name saying that this amount is accurate and put it on the company that way, and that’s something that they’ll send out to all their users saying, “Hey, if you lose the receipt, use this document,” and they upload that as a receipt.

That’s typically the most common. Or if you don’t want to go that extra step, just have them type up something saying the same exact thing, receipt was lost, this is the date I went. If you want them to provide a picture of their credit card statement with it, they can screenshot that and then upload it directly as the receipt so then they can be able to submit it.

If a report is submitted without all transactions merged, can those unmerged transactions be deleted? So if you have the merge requirement turned on, they would not even be able to submit that report if there’s expenses without transactions merged. Transactions cannot be deleted though, because those are the… Let me back up for a second there. So transactions are coming directly from the corporate card fee that would be set up through your bank. So since those are coming directly from the bank, we would not be able to delete that transaction. If it is a manual expense that they created though, those would be able to be deleted.

If the expense report gets all the way to final approval and it makes it through, then we wouldn’t be able to delete it. But if it’s still within its submission phase and going through the approval process, you’d be able to return that report and be able to leave a note saying, “Hey, we need this expense deleted.” You submitted the transaction, whatever that reason might be.

How do you turn the requirement on? Assuming that is for the merge requirement, so we would do that directly in policies and it is under general rules. So the default for this is going to be corporate card toggled off. If you toggle it on, that’s when these two other options show up. So you’d be able to require merging of an expense with a corporate card transaction. Like I said, I typically recommend turning this on just so people are not submitting an expense and then the duplicate transaction, but letting people know that they will have to wait until the transaction actually posts.

A lot of really good questions. Thank you everybody for being so engaged on this today. It definitely helps and gives me a good sense of exactly how people are using our policies and our platform. So we do of course have more Customer Success Manager Office Hours coming up. They are held every other Wednesday at this time. So definitely want to check out those and we will continue to update the topics so you can register for them in advance the same exact way that you registered for this one.

So I’ll give it a couple more minutes in case there’s any other questions that come in. But thank you everybody so much for joining us today and looking forward to seeing you all on some more Customer Success Manager Office Hours. I know there’s a few people that you can expect to see an email coming from me in just a little bit as well. Just one more, if you want to take a screenshot of this slide, just one more view at the emails that you can access. But thank you everybody so much for joining and we will be talking to you all soon.