Expense policy allows you to define a set of rules for expense claims in your company. You can set up the rules that apply to all expense categories by default or set an individual category exception.
Here's are the rules that you can set:
Max amount: Maximum amount an employee can claim for an individual expense (or per day). If the expense amount is greater than this, it will be flagged as a violation.
Receipt required limit: Any expense exceeding this limit will need a receipt. If you want to make receipt mandatory for all the expense claims, you can simply set the limit to 0.
Max expense age: Age is defined as the number of days since the employee made the expense. Any expense older than this will be flagged as a violation.
Purpose field: You can make purpose field mandatory if you want employees to give you additional context for the expense (short description or purpose).
📝 Note:
Expenses that fall outside the boundaries of your rules will be flagged as a violation.
Employees will be able to submit out of policy expenses for approval.
Out of policy warnings will be displayed prominently to the submitter as well as the approver.
How to set up Expense Policy?
Company Owners and Admins can set up a default expense policy or other than the default policy, they can create new policies too (applies to all expense categories) by following these steps:
Log in to your Travelstop account
Go to 'Company settings' and select 'Policy'
You will see a section for Expense policy, where you can set your Policy.
Click + New expense policy to create a new expense policy in addition to the default one
Additionally, you can rename your custom policies
Click Delete expense policy to delete custom policies you have created
Click Show details and Edit details to add Policy for all your expense categories at once.
How to add category exceptions?
To add an exception for an individual expense category, you can follow these steps:
Look for Exception section under Expense policy
Click on Add exception
Select the category and add the rules
Associate Policy With a User
You have the option to set up a policy either at an individual user level or at a group level. To ensure clarity and enable a more deterministic policy selection process, we are introducing a concept called the 'primary group.' This is particularly important when employees belong to multiple groups and we need to determine which policy to apply when they create an expense report. The primary group serves as the designated group for an employee from the list of groups they are a member of, enabling a more definitive and consistent approach for administrators
Let's begin with the process of setting up a policy at the employee level
Go to the "Settings" tab and click on "Users"
Locate the specific employee for whom you wish to set up the policy and click on their name. This action will open the "Edit User" modal, allowing the admin to modify the employee's metadata.
Inside the modal, you will find a field labeled "Expense Policy" Click on the dropdown menu, and you will see a list of available expense policies for your company.
Select the desired expense policy from the options provided and assign it to the employee.
Finally, click on "Save" to save the changes.
📝 Note: From now on, whenever this employee creates an expense report, the expense policy designated by the admin will be applied accordingly.
Now, let's go through the process of setting up a policy at the group level
Access the "Settings" tab and click on "Groups"
A list of groups will be displayed. Choose the desired group by clicking on it.
In the group details view, you will find information such as the group name, the designated approvers, the group members, and the "Policy" section.
a. By default, no policy is attached to any group, which means the option "Use default policy" is selected automatically.
b. If the admin wishes to select a specific policy for the group, they can click on "Select custom policy" and choose the desired expense policy for that particular group.
📝 Note : The default option applies no policy to the group, while the custom option allows the admin to assign a specific expense policy.
The following are other important points to remember
If the admin has assigned a policy at both the employee and group levels, Travelstop follows the following logic to determine which policy gets applied to an employee:
a. If a policy is set up at the employee level, it will always take precedence over any other selection.
b. If the employee does not have a policy at the employee level but has a primary group (since they are a member of multiple groups), the policy set up for the primary group will be applied.
c. If the employee does not have a policy at the employee level and is not a member of any group with a designated policy , or if there is no primary group, then the default policy for the company will be applied. Please note that the default policy exists for the company and cannot be deleted.If an employee is a member of one or more groups but none of the groups are designated as the employee's primary group, and the admin has not set up any policy at the employee level, then the default policy will be applied.
If an employee is removed from a group, even if it was their primary group, and the admin has not set up any policy at the employee level, the default policy will still be applied to that employee.
What happens if the admin deletes a policy? Once an expense report has been created or submitted by the employee in the past and is attached to a deleted policy (Policy A), it will continue to be associated with Policy A.
Let's consider a scenario where Policy A is attached to a specific expense report that the employee is still drafting. If the admin updates the set of rules of Policy A before the employee submits the report, the new set of rules will be applied to future expense reports. However, the new rules will not be applied retrospectively to anything in the past.
📝 Note:
Exceptions will overwrite the default rules that apply to all categories
💡 Pro-tip: Employees can click on the 📖 icon on the navigation bar (top right) to view the current expense policy