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 an Expense Policy?
Company Owners and Admins can set up a default expense policy or create one or more custom policies 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
Name your custom policy
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
Applying policies
As a company admin or owner, you have the option to set up policies either at an individual employee level or at a group level. To provide more control and clarity over group level policies, you can now set a primary group for each employee. Once set, the expense policy associated with this primary group is selected and applied for the employee when they submit an expense report. Employees will no longer be able to change the designated approvers, unless overridden by admins at the employee level.
👥 Group level policy
Navigate to Company Settings and then click on Groups
From the list of existing groups, select the one you want to update
In the group details view, you'll find information like the group name, approval process, approvers, group members, and the policy section.
By default, the default policy applies to the members of a group if not explicitly set
Alternatively, if the admin prefers to set a custom policy for the group, they can select a custom policy from the list of expense policies setup
Finally, click the Save group button to save your changes
👔 Employee level policy
Navigate to Company Settings and then click on Users
Locate the specific employee you want to set up a policy for, and click on their name
In the Edit user modal, select an Expense policy for this employee
Click on Save to save your settings
How is the policy determined for an expense report?
This will largely depend on whether the employee who is submitting the expense report has an employee level policy, a primary group, the expense policy set for the primary group, or otherwise. The following describes the process of selecting the expense policy in each of these cases:
If the employee submitting the expense report has an Expense policy set at the employee level, this policy is selected and applied to the expense report.
If the employee submitting the expense report does not have an expense policy set at the employee level, but has a primary group setup, the expense policy is picked up from the employee's primary group.
If the employee submitting the expense report does not have an expense policy set at the employee level, nor do they have a primary group set, the Default policy is applied to the expense report
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 or updates 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 that same policy (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 for 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 override 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