9.2 Expenses System Options, Expense Report Templates and Expense Types

The published objectives are Manage Expenses System Options and Set up Expense Report Templates and Types. Everything an employee sees on the Create Expense Item page comes from these two setups.

Manage Expenses System Options

You set system options with the Manage Expenses System Options task (Offering: Financials, Functional Area: Expenses). There are two levels:

• All Business Units: the implementation-wide values.
• Specific Business Unit: exceptions created in the Create System Options: Specific Business Unit dialog box.

Options documented by Oracle include:

A good test question pattern: "Business unit X needs a different value." The answer is almost always a specific business unit row in system options, not a new template or profile option.

Expense report templates

An expense template groups related expense types for one business unit, for example Travel, Education or Relocation. Oracle's rules:

• A business unit can have several templates.
• Templates can't be shared across business units. A company operating in several countries creates one template per business unit. If users in a business unit work in several languages, implement templates in each language.
• If a business unit has no template at all, you can't implement Expenses for it.

The default template

The default expense template exists so corporate card charges arrive with expense types already assigned.

• It is the first template you create with corporate card expense type mapping. The application makes it the default whether or not you select Set as default.
• A business unit has only one default template, with or without other templates.
• You can change the default, but only to a template with card mapping enabled. Otherwise the Set as default check box is disabled.
• When the card feed uploads, the default template's Card Expense Type Mapping tab matches issuer card expense types to your expense types.

End dates

Leave Effective End Date blank unless you are retiring a template. Expenses incurred after the end date can't be reported on it, although reports active in the earlier period can still use it.

• You can also end-date individual expense types, which is more common.
• The template end date overrides an expense type's end date.
• If you end-date the default template and no other default exists, card mapping stops.

Expense types

An expense type is a granular expense within a category. For example, the Accommodations category can contain Hotel, Motel and Bed and Breakfast. The Type list shows up to 250 types. Expense types are template-specific: one can't be referenced from another template, but you can create a type with the same name there.

On the Create Expense Type page you set:

• Account: the natural expense account for the type.
• Receipts: whether receipts are required, optionally only above an amount, for cash expenses, card expenses or both.
• Policies: the expense policy assigned to the type (section 9.3).
• Tax: a tax classification code that defaults on expense entry, which users can override when the tax field is enabled. You can also assign a tax product category, which needs Configuration Owner Tax Options and a Required Expense Location. It isn't shown to employees, but it is passed to Payables when Process Expense Reimbursements creates the payment request.

Itemization

Itemization breaks one charge into parts that go to different accounts, such as a hotel folio's room, tax and meals, or a meal's food, tip and tax.

• Itemization on the type is Disabled, Enabled (optional) or Required.
• With Enabled or Required, include at least one expense type on the Itemization tab. You also decide whether each type can be used only as an itemization or also as a standalone type.
• Automatic itemization for card charges is set on the template's Card Expense Type Mapping tab. It needs a default itemization expense type, such as Miscellaneous, which receives any amounts outside the defined itemization.

Project-enabled expense types

On the Project Expenditure Type Mapping tab:

• Select Enable projects and a default project expenditure type.
• Optionally require receipts for project expenses.
• Map the type to a specific project unit and expenditure type on an exception basis. This mapping drives accounting in Project Costing.

The prerequisites are the project unit and project expenditure type in Project Foundation.

Expense field behavior and precedence

Four modifiable fields can be controlled: Description, Merchant Name, Number of Days and Expense Location.

• On the template's Expense Fields tab, each is Null, Hidden, Optional or Required. A new template defaults them to Hidden. Null means the template has no setting.
• On an expense type, each is Use setup from expense template (the default), Hidden, Optional or Required.
• The expense type setting wins. If the type says Optional and the template says Required, the field is Optional.
• With nothing at either level, settings fall back to the category, policy and tax setups. Description falls back to Optional. The mobile app ignores tax-level settings.

Category-specific fields, such as Merchant Name and Checkout Date for Accommodations, are Hidden, Optional or Required for each category, by business unit. For extra data, the Expense Report Header descriptive flexfield captures up to 27 fields. These can be global, specific to a business unit (value set ORA_EXM_BUSINESS_UNIT, whose context names must match the business unit names), or context-sensitive.

How an expense item's account is derived

1. Each user needs a default expense account in HR. Without it, they can't submit expense reports. Example: 01-520-0000-0000-000.
2. The expense type supplies the natural account. Hotel = 7670 gives 01-520-7670-0000-000.
3. With the Override Expense Account Allocation privilege (Security Console), the employee can change the Company and Cost Center segments, for example to 02-540-7670-0000-000.
4. With the profile option EXM_ALLOW_FULL_ACCT_OVERRIDE = Yes (site, product or user level), the employee can change any segment.

A related profile option, EXM_DFLT_FROM_PREV_EXPENSE = N, stops a new item copying the date, template, location, currency, company, department and project from the previous item.