Credit Card Integration for Expense Reports

Our expense reporting customers love our credit card integration module and find it to be a huge time-saver and hassle-minimizer for their users. The main purpose of this post is to quickly explain how the credit card integration works with our system. So here goes….

Two Words – Very Easy!

In our application, users can automatically download transactions from their corporate and personal credit cards with the click of a button. This uses the standard OFX format, supported by most banks and credit card companies. As a 1st step, the user must setup the credit card profile in the system. Each user can setup multiple profiles and they can be a mix of corporate and personal cards. Each credit card profile can be allocated to different pay methods, as defined by the Accounting person in the company. Once this is done, the user can toggle between the various cards from a list and select one, as shown here

After a card is selected, the user would enter the login credentials as they would if they were logging into their online account, pick a start and end date and Voila! – all the transactions within that date range are imported into the transactions bucket of the application and ready to be pulled into a report, as shown below. This process can be automated a 100%

Allocating Transactions

Once this is done, the user can then assign these transactions to different expense types or GL codes. All information supplied by the credit card merchant is available within the transaction, including the meta-data. So each transaction will include the date, amount, vendor, city and additional fields depending on what is supplied by the bank/CC company. The user can also choose to break down transactions in more detail if needed. For example, a hotel transaction imported from a credit card will typically show the total amount. But the user can break it down into Room rate, Tax, Room Service and Laundry by using the sub-amount fields within the application. Remember, ‘More visibility = More Compliance’

Reconciliation of Credit Card Data

Once all the credit card data is available in the system, reconciliation, which normally takes hours or even days becomes very quick & simple too. Within the Gorilla Expense system, the accounting / AP person can quickly run a report by a pay method and filter by specific employees as well. This report can be exported in multiple formats (PDF, Word, Excel) and compared to the credit card data supplied by the bank for a quick analysis. This will quickly tell if the transactions are valid or if any transactions have been missed by the employee. Since reports can be created for specific date ranges, there is no need to wait till month end (when there are typically 15 other bigger issues to take care of!) to do this. The Accounting person can reconcile every day, week or 2 weeks to make it easier to manage.

Other Credit Card File Formats

Besides the standard OFX format discussed above, we support numerous other corporate card file formats as well. A few examples of key formats are – GL1025 from American Express, CDF3 from MasterCard, VCF from VISA, among many others.

The operating mechanism for these is slightly different from the one described above. These files supplied by the credit card merchant typically include credit card data for ALL users within the company. So unlike the mechanism above where users can import transactions themselves, here the Accounting person (or Admin) will use our proprietary utility called ‘Gorilla Integration Manager’ (GIM) to import the data into the system. Once the merchant’s daily credit card feed for the company is available and imported into GIM, it will automatically correlate specific transactions to specific users and push them to the respective user accounts. So the Admin can, for example, push 5000 transactions to the various user accounts in the system with the click of a button!! From there on, the user has to simply pull these transactions into a report and submit!

Hope you find this information to be useful. Contact us for more information or any specific questions we can help with at info@gorillaexpense.com.