Expenses overview

Expenses simplify your company's expense reporting and approval process. Employees can submit expense reports from any location, and Intacct automatically routes them to the appropriate supervisor for approval. Supervisors receive an email notification when a report is submitted.

Supervisors can do the following:

  • View the submitted expense report.

  • Approve the submitted expense report as is.

  • Request changes or additional detail.

After the expense report is approved, it becomes a bill. Then, the accounting team processes the bill and issues a check or online payment. The appropriate data is automatically posted to other applications, such as Accounts Payable and General Ledger.

Employees can do the following:

  • Check the status of their expense reports in the approval and payment cycle.

  • Review their entire expense history.

Advance payments

Accounting team can issue an advance payment before an employee submits an expense report. For example, a new hire might need funds for a large moving expense. After the expense occurs and the report is submitted, the advance is applied to the bill.

Expense report details

Expense reports can include unlimited line items, each of which can specify different expense types, departments, and locations. Employees can add notes in addition to the mandatory data, such as expense type and cost. Also, they can add attachments to their expense reports. For example, employees in New York scan and attach receipts to submit expense reports to their manager in California.

Expense types

Instead of using account number or labels, you can use expense types to do the following:

  1. Give General Ledger (GL) accounts used for employee expense reports more recognizable names.

  2. Restrict access to accounts that you do not want employees to use.

    For example, you do not want employees posting expenses to an equity account. To prevent this, do not create an expense type for that account.

You can assign one or more expense types to any General Ledger account. For example, the car mileage account is "7216 Transportation", but the expense type could be "Mileage" to make it easier and faster for employees to recognize.

Expense payment types

You can use expense payment types to do the following:

  • Track how expenses were paid.

  • Create both reimbursable and non-reimbursable expenses.

    For example, you create payment types for company credit cards or checks for non-reimbursable expenses. Each expense payment type can have a specific offset account assigned for easier reconciliation.

You can assign expense payment types to expense reports and expense adjustments.

Reports

Application reports include the expense ledger, check register for employee expenses, and the employee list.

An optional Client Expense Reporting solution is available for professional services companies with more sophisticated expense reporting requirements. This application includes expense bill-back, project expense tracking, and PDA support, among other features.

The life cycle of reimbursement requests and delivered payments

Reimbursement requests and delivered payments go through several states during their life cycle. Center actions can only be performed at specific stages of this cycle.