Chapter 8. PeopleSoft Expenses Module

In a large organization, the task of tracking and managing expense claims for employees is quite effort-intensive. The PeopleSoft Expenses module is an important self-service application used to automate and streamline the employee travel and expense transactions. The PeopleSoft Expenses system features can be categorized into four broad areas: cash advances, expense reports, timesheet data, and travel authorizations. Usually cash advances are given to employees before going on business travel. Expense reports are used to claim the reimbursement for business expenses incurred by the employees. Travel authorizations are used to pre-approve the estimated travel costs. The Expenses module can integrate with an external travel reservation application to perform travel reservations. Timesheets are used to record employees' working hours.

In this chapter, we will discuss following topics related to the most commonly used system features: the processing of cash...

Understanding expenses processes

The following schematic describes the high-level processes in the PeopleSoft Expenses module:

As this module is intended to be used as a tool by the employees in an organization, it needs to maintain their employee profiles. PeopleSoft offers two different methods to do this. Employee information stored in the Expenses module includes elements such as address, bank account information, credit card details, default accounting information, and so on. We can load all the necessary employee details from the PeopleSoft Human Resources Management System (HRMS) using a delivered batch process or we can create the employee profiles manually using the online pages.

The PeopleSoft Expenses module needs to create accounting entries for expense reports and cash advances. The default chartfield information for creating these accounting entries comes from the business units, employee profiles, cash advance sources, and expense types.

The Expenses module provides a flexible...

Understanding cash advance and expense report configurations

In order to use the cash advance and expense report features, we need to perform various setups. In this section, we'll familiarize ourselves with some of the most important configurations.

• Maintaining employee profiles

• Cash advance sources

• Expense types

• Location amounts

• Per diem ranges

• Per diem amounts

Maintaining employee profiles

The PeopleSoft Expenses module is intended to be used by an organization's employees to create expense reports and get their business expenses reimbursed. Therefore, it is important that the system maintains detailed information about all valid employees. We'll quickly look at two different methods of maintaining employee details in the Expenses module.

Manually updating employee data

This method is recommended when an organization does not use PeopleSoft HRMS applications.

Follow this navigation to maintain employee information:

Travel & Expenses | Manage Employee Information | Update Profile

The Employee...

Understanding expenses approvals

For any organization that processes cash advances and expense reports, it is extremely important that strict financial controls are in place to ensure that fraudulent expenses are not claimed and paid. This is where the PeopleSoft Expense module's flexible approval feature comes into picture. PeopleSoft delivers various pre-configured approval rules and roles as part of the Approval Workflow Engine (AWE). We can configure various approval and audit rules for expense transactions by modifying these pre-configured objects.

In this section, we'll discuss some of the important configurations for expense approvals:

• Approver types

• Transaction definitions

• Refinement templates

• Privilege templates

• Approver profiles

• Approver assignments

• Approver routing lists

Defining approver types

The expenses approval hierarchy in an organization consists of various roles, that perform different actions. For example, an expense report may go to the accounts supervisor first, who checks if...

Interfacing external data with expenses

Now that we have familiarized ourselves with some of the important Expenses configurations, we'll now move to another important area. The Expenses module is capable of integrating with various external non-PeopleSoft entities to import data using delivered interface batch processes. In this section, we'll discuss two of the most widely used integrations: with credit card vendors and benchmark data organizations.

Importing credit card data

As we discussed earlier, organizations can utilize corporate cards to be used by employees. When the card vendor sends the statement for expense transactions, PeopleSoft can automatically load them into the Expenses module. Once loaded, employees can be notified of the pending charges. They can copy these transactions onto their expense reports. Finally, if so desired, the payment can be directly made to the card vendor.

PeopleSoft offers delivered integration with five different credit card vendors: American Express...

Creating cash advances

PeopleSoft Expenses offers a capability where an employee can create a cash advance request, which can be routed through various levels of hierarchy before it is approved. Depending on an organization's policy, an approved cash advance may or may not result in a system-generated payment. Irrespective of payment creation, a cash advance must be created and approved to maintain an audit trail.

Follow this navigation to enter a cash advance request:

Travel and Expenses | Travel and Expense Center | Cash Advance | Create

The following screenshot shows a sample cash advance:

• Business Purpose: This is a mandatory field where we can select a business purpose (defined on a configuration page) for the cash advance.

• Details section: This area is used to enter individual cash advance lines. Select an appropriate cash advance source in the Source column along with its description and advance amount.

• Import ATM Advances: This hyperlink is used to automatically populate the ATM advance...

Processing expense reports

A typical expense report processing cycle consists of the following steps:

1. The employee creates an expense report to record all the expense transactions, such as hotel, taxi, airfare, meals, and so on. If any cash advances were taken, they are associated with the expense report.

2. An expense report is submitted for approval and is routed through as many approval levels as needed. The approval rules can be configured based on an organization's policies. If expense report details are found to be satisfactory, it is approved by one or more relevant approvers.

3. The employee submits the receipts for all valid business expenses.

4. The expense department verifies the receipts and marks the expense report accordingly.

5. The expense reports are posted and accounting entries are created to recognize a liability for future payment due to the employee.

6. Once all the approvals are in place and receipts are verified, the expense report is staged for payment. The payment can be made through...

Summary

PeopleSoft Expenses is an important module used to automate various employee transactions such as requesting and issuing cash advances, recording and processing expense reports for business purposes, recording time sheets, and reserving and booking travel requests.

We can design a wide range of approval rules using the Approval Workflow Engine (AWE). PeopleSoft offers various pre-configured options which can be modified or new configurations can be created as needed. Based on an organization's requirements, we can configure which expense transactions need to be passed through an approval hierarchy, define various approval roles, specify chartfields for routing, and set up approval amount thresholds, among other things.

PeopleSoft Expenses is capable of integrating with external entities to import credit card transactions for employee expenses and benchmark data to establish expense reimbursement guidelines.

Cash advances can be requested by employees and, if necessary, payments issued...