Tips and Tricks for Expense Administration

This document presents tips and tricks for the Expense Administration course. 

All exercises under Allowance Rules are performed in IFS/Travel Allowance, which is only adapted for the Swedish and German markets. Although some functionality may work outside these markets, IFS Applications only supports these two markets. Therefore, we recommend that you skip these parts of the course when training for countries outside Sweden and Germany.

Click one of the items below to see information that may be helpful to you as you go through the course.

• Users
• Create Allowance Rules
• Allowance Rules—Create Allowance ID
• Allowance Rules—Abroad Rule
• Allowance Rules—Create Expense Codes for Domestic Travels
• Allowance Rules—Create Expense Codes for Abroad Travels
• Allowance Rules—Connect Expense Codes to Allowance IDs
• Registering Expenses—Registering Entertainment Costs
• Handling Payment in Full

Users

Create Allowance Rules

• The allowance rules that are created in this exercise are valid only for the Swedish market. Although IFS/Travel Allowance is adapted for the German market as well, the contents of the exercise will have to be changed if the training will be used for German allowance calculations.
• The Expense Rules and Mileage Limits exercise should be completed before the Create Allowance Rules exercise. Otherwise you will have to start by creating a new expense rule.

Allowance Rules—Create Allowance ID

Students often have a problem with this exercise because they are unfamiliar with the regulations of allowance calculation. 

Allowance regulation summary: 

• Tax-free allowance is issued based on whether travel lasts whole or half days: 

• Whole day: Travel starts before 12 AM the first day and ends after 7 PM the second day, and includes one overnight stay.
• Half day: Travel starts either after 12 AM the first day or ends before 7 PM the second day, and includes one overnight stay.
• Although the employer can compensate an employee whose travel does not include an overnight stay, the compensation will not be tax-free.

• The travel start and end times are defined in the Latest Departure and Earliest Return fields:

• Whole day: 12 AM – 7 PM
• Half day: 11:59 PM – 6 AM
• Day allowance: 11:59 PM – 12 PM

• System parameters for other requirements: 

• Because the system needs a flag to use for prioritizing the calculation, you need to enter a priority order for the allowance. Use 1 for whole day, 2 for half day, and 3-4 for day allowance. 
• The requirements for overnight stays are handled by the Overnight Required check box, use it on Whole/Half Day allowances.
• Because the hours between 12 PM and 6 AM are not accounted for in Swedish allowance calculations, use only hours after 6 AM on whole/half day allowances.
• Swedish Abroad Travels uses the country where the travel has lasted the longest. When selecting which country’s allowance value should be used in the allowance calculation, clear the Use last country check box.

Allowance Rules—Abroad Rule

The country register code, ISO Country, is not used in Travel Expense. This is because German allowance calculation sometimes uses one pricing for a country and another pricing for a city in that country. Travel Expense uses a different concept called Area, which is new to 2001. Students must manually enter a country.

Allowance Rules—Create Expense Codes for Domestic Travels

• Students may have some difficulty with the last step of this exercise, in which allowances should be summarized on the expense report. Have the student enter either Domestic Allowance or Taxable Benefits in the Subtotal Description field on each expense code.
• Another common mistake is using the default date in the Valid From field, which uses the date on which the code was created. Due to this, the expense code might not be valid when the student creates an expense report.

Allowance Rules—Create Expense Codes for Abroad Travels

Besides the problems mentioned above, there is sometimes a problem explaining how to handle pricing of expense codes for travels abroad. 

A simplified explanation is that the price is a percentage of the amount of money registered on the area that is defined in the Abroad Rule field. So, by connecting the expense code to the abroad rule, the correct price is collected when the calculation is performed.

Allowance Rules—Connect Expense Codes to Allowance IDs

• Students frequently save a row in this tab using valid from/to dates that differ from the dates entered in the Valid From/To fields on the expense codes. This is easily determined because the Description field will be empty. This error might not be discovered until students try to use the code in the allowance calculation.
• There are often questions regarding the connection between expense codes and taxable benefits or deductions.
  • Taxable benefits are registered both with a deduction type and by selecting the Taxable benefits check box.
  • Deductions are connected to the correct deduction type.

Registering Expenses—Registering Entertainmnet Expenses

• Students should be advised to create a guest list when registering entertainment costs. This avoids the student from receiving warning messages saying that a guest list is required when confirming, approving, and authorizing expense sheets.

Handling Payment in Full

• A problem with the exercises using the Payment in Full function is that ALL expense sheets that are authorized are included. This means that the students will disturb each other (i.e. ruin the data for each other) when doing these exercises unless this is taken into consideration.
• Another problem that can occur is when the students are trying to create the payment file. The exercise tells the student to save the file in C:\Temp but according to the way the application is set up they may have to save it in another location. You should know the location where students should save their files if it differs from the one stated in the exercise.