By popular customer demand, we have released a new (and cool) feature where the application will automatically calculate the number of miles using Google Maps. For this, the user will need to enter the start & end locations on a map within the web application. Once selected, the application will calculate the number of miles and drop it into the transaction. Since we already pull-in the IRS defined mileage rate, the math to calculate the amount is complete! The application also saves the Start and End locations in the comments field for reference. Here is how it looks:
1) Open an expense transaction and pick Mileage expense type. There the user will see a Google Maps link. Click on it. In the next screen as shown below, enter the Start and End Addresses, then select on the ‘Import Mileage’ button
Mileage-Expense-Map
2) Once this done, the mileage expense type is complete as shown in the image below. As you can see, the application automatically imports the IRS mileage rate and does the math. It also adds the Start and End addresses to the Comments box. After the user clicks on Save, the transaction can be added to an expense report for submission.
Done… Accurately and in less than 5 seconds! And conveniently from within our application, without having to go to an external map application every time.
Here is a frequently heard request from Accounts Payable departments (AP) in companies around the world –
‘Can we integrate T&E with our Payroll system to issue reimbursements faster and error-free?’ And a very pertinent request at that – considering that AP is largely responsible for issuing T&E reimbursements.
A recently conducted survey, with results displayed below, showed that at least 74% of T&E reimbursements fall largely within the domain of AP. This becomes an additional burden to handle for AP among other important tasks. Plus, the ripple effects of delayed reimbursements or wrong reimbursements affects the heart of the business: the morale of the workforce. So it really is a no-brainer to automate this process through integration.
And this fits into the overall theme for companies in the 21st century which is – religiously examining ways towards becoming more efficient and effective at what they do. And on that list is frustration and delays with T&E reimbursements for employees after a trip. This is especially true after an international trip where the employee could have sizable out of pocket expenses with imminent due dates on their credit cards. Therefore integration of T&E and Payroll systems is paramount and companies are investigating in more detail on how to maintain a seamless integration between these two systems which are essentially two sides of the same coin.
Payroll systems look at an employee at one point in time, chiefly, what is that employee’s salary or hourly wage today. They automatically calculate net pay for a given pay period, federal, state and local taxes, deductions for such items as health care copays and contributions to charities etc. These systems also automatically cut checks to employees or have their pay automatically deposited into their bank account.
T&E Expense Reporting systems, on the other hand, help manage the employees expenses from a trip. If the company utilizes a corporate card, then the employee submits those expenses are part of the same system. The key pieces of the expense transaction includes details about the trip, expense type, vendor and mainly the receipt of the transaction.
The benefits of integration between these two systems are:
– Reduce reimbursement time
– No more manual keying of data in multiple places
– Utilize the existing flow and scheduling for T&E reimbursements
– Real-time visibility of reimbursement status for all parties
– And most importantly, the emotional aspect – employees expect the company to reimburse them for out-of-pocket expenses ASAP. And by automating the process as much as possible (which in turn reduces errors, delays and frustrations), it shows the employees that the company cares!
So how does this typically work?
The natural next step for T&E data after it has been reconciled in the expense reporting & ERP systems is sending it to the Payroll system. Think of it as ‘Passing the expense report data baton’!
Expense-Reporting-Payroll-Integration
Here is how it works in steps –
– Once the expense reports are approved within the Gorilla Expense web application, Gorilla Expense can automatically generate 2 files 1) Payroll file precisely in the same format as expected by your payroll provider 2) GL File precisely in the same format as expected by ERP System
– The payroll file can be imported into the Payroll system to issue reimbursement
– The GL file can be imported into the ERP system for GL entries
– If the Payroll system setup for T&E reimbursements is the same as payroll, then the employee will be reimbursed for T&E expenses during the next payroll cycle
Contact us at info@gorillaexpense.com if you have any questions or if we can help you manage this process more efficiently for your company.
We recently updated our mobile app to offer a very cool new feature from within the mobile app for receipt management. Users can now attach receipts from their Dropbox account to transactions on the mobile app! (If you don’t have a Dropbox account yet, don’t worry – we won’t judge you. We will however make fun of you :). Sign up is very easy.)
The attached receipts can be standard .jpg or .png receipts taken with a camera. But the great thing about it is that now you can also attach multi-page PDF receipts! Super convenient is what we are shooting for with this feature and it delivers. Here is what it looks like:
Mobile-App
During the 1st-time login, the app will ask the user for permission to link to their Dropbox account. Once the user approves, the user can attach anything from their Dropbox account.
We recommend users to create a ‘Receipts’ folder within their Dropbox and access that from our mobile app. That way everything is organized better and data management becomes easier.
From a process standpoint it is easy as Apple Pie (or cake; we forget). Simply click on ‘Add Photo’, select ‘Dropbox’ and pick the respective receipt from there. Finito!
Hope you find this feature to be useful while crossing the Seven Seas. As always, contact us at info@gorillaexpense.com if you have any questions or would like to discuss in more detail!
Are you still filing expense reports in Excel sheets and attaching paper receipts with Scotch tape? Then it is time to change that and officially enter the 21st century. Using smartphones and web based applications, the modern day business traveler utilizes the latest technology to efficiently complete expense reports and also make sure that the company’s dollars are spent wisely.
This Dilbert cartoon says it all – Manual old school expense reporting is just painful!
Expense Reporting is painful! The time for change is now! Rather than taking large risky steps, many businesses are turning to the cloud for cost-effective T&E expense management tools that automate and streamline the creation, review and approval of expense reports. Using smartphones, travelers can track expenses as they happen, take photos of receipts, and submit expenses all from the palm of their hand in seconds!
Some of the key areas to look for while evaluating expense reporting solutions are:
1) The ability for employees to photograph , attach or email electronic receipts and easily assign them to line-item expenses
2) Expense reporting systems where credit card transactions can be imported
3) The ability to send T&E expense data into any accounting system like QuickBooks, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, Oracle etc. through automation
Gorilla Expense offers all of the above, and is fully integrated with various corporate credit cards and Accounting systems, which means manual data entry is reduced in multiple places, accounting errors are eliminated, employees are reimbursed faster and billable expenses can be tracked easier. In conclusion, whether on the road or back at the office, businesses and employees can now easily manage their T&E expenses – online, or on a smartphone with just a few clicks! So jump in to the 21st century with us!
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
Expense-Report-Credit-Card-Integration
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%
Expense-Report-Credit-Card-Integration
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.
A new breed of CFOs are here – and they are here to stay. It seems that more and more CFOs are now looking beyond just reporting on quarterly results. Today’s CFOs take part in product innovation, come up with breakthrough business ideas, challenge corporate customs and are more involved in front end growth of the company. A recent report titled ‘Managing Innovation’ put together by the AICPA (American Institute of CPAs) and CIMA (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants), corroborates this new trend while providing tips from the CFOs themselves. Here are five areas –
Early stage ideas need to be treated differently
Expense-Reporting-Ideas
Several CFOs noted that companies, even innovative, make a big mistake by treating early stage concepts and ideas within their R&D departments with traditional financial metrics and guidelines. This saps the innovative spirit while miring the innovative process in more paperwork and justifications. Nurturing success at this stage means applying different rules – right from the beginning. The study notes that ‘Distrust is exacerbated when early-stage ideas are prematurely tested against traditional financial metric, before they can evolve’. Because of this many finance executives call for relaxed P&Ls, reasonable growth metrics and don’t demand too much of new ventures, at least initially.
Creative use of capital
Shell allocates $1.5B every year to R&D, plus sends a further $4B for incubating innovative ideas and solutions across all of its business lines. A good part of it goes to – what it refers to as – ‘the game-changer budget’, a fund used by employees to apply for innovative research projects outside of their daily work. ‘A finance function needs to understand the business well enough to know what is a worthwhile activity’ says Royal Dutch Shell CFO Simon Henry.
How do you define risk?
Risk is inevitable for every business. And no risk means no reward. Common knowledge, correct? Not as common as you think. ‘The perception that risk management is there to apply the brakes is a misconception’, says Anita Menon, Chief Risk Office at Prudential BSN Takaful, a joint venture between Prudential and Bank Simpanan Nasional. ‘The risk function is there to encourage the business to understand that they need balanced strategies or actions in order to grow the company’
CFO is now CIO, as in Controlled Innovation Officer
Simon Henry, CFO of Shell says that the finance department’s visibility and role in monitoring the performance of various business units makes it uniquely positioned to counter risk with planned opportunity. Having that twin outlook brings guidance to gung-ho projects and ideas that are sure to change the world but without a qualified financial base, which is needed to build sustainable businesses. ‘We want to encourage innovation and not stifle it, but not in a totally uncontrolled way’, says Henry.
Inside the belly of the beast
To manage innovation better, many CFOs are inclined to place top lieutenants where the action is – inside new ventures and projects. Giving a top finance exec. this level of visibility and access, where innovation is ripe and unbridled, helps to not only build the business case for funding such projects but also get a more in-the -trenches experience that is uncommon for finance folks. This helps finance understand the process, chaotic as it may be, and that not everything can be qualified in Microsoft Excel. ‘The role of [finance embeds] is decision support, from idea right through to launch’, says Stephen Bolton, group controller at Diageo.
So, as a CFO, do you see yourself employing one or more of these recommendations? Let us know in the comments below or by sending an email to info@gorillaexpense.com
By popular demand from our global customers, we have released a new feature for capturing VAT. Now, users will be able to list the VAT amount(s) for an expense. Since the transaction includes the receipt, companies will be in compliance with typical VAT reclaim requirements. Depending on the country, different VAT rate categories can be configured in the system.
This is really nifty and helps with more T&E visibility for stakeholders. Also it makes VAT reclaim for companies a piece of cake (or a piece of pie if you are from Europe:) Simply compile the expenses, list all the VAT transactions and you are ready to report it! Hope you enjoy this functionality. As always, we love to hear from you – info@gorillaexpense.com
2012 was a great year for us. We advanced our product to the next level through some very innovative features and updates. Some of the ideas came from our customers who love our solution and what it did to solve their T&E pain. Many thanks to them!
Now 2013 is here and we are bustling with new ideas. Our goal is still the same – No more hassle with expense reporting.
We had a very successful exhibition of our T&E expense reporting solution at DEMO last week. DEMO is one of the biggest technology launchpad conferences in the US that provides a stage for young companies with disruptive and game-changing solutions. The event has been in existence since the 1980s. Some of the name brands that have emerged from DEMO include Salesforce.com, Tivo, VMWare and WebEx among others.
Microsoft selected us from several global companies and sponsored us to attend and present at this show (thanks again Microsoft!). It was great to receive kudos and recognition from someone like Microsoft. Our solid integration with Dynamics GP, NAV, AX and SL caught their attention and they wanted us to discuss the innovations we were making in T&E expense reporting – an old pain point that hasn’t been solved yet!
It was very exciting to fly out to SFO and showcase our solution in the heart of the Silicon Valley. We were also 1 of the 2 companies from Georgia. This is great news for the Southeast hi-tech scene. It puts Georgia on the map for hi-tech innovation compared to the bigger players like Boston, New York and of course the Silicon Valley.
We look forward to being part of the DEMO alumni and continue taking the pain out of expense reporting for companies and employees!
