v16.199 is a fresh look at the concept of reimbursable expenses. The tool, found in expenses and accessible to managers with the can manage finances privilege, lets you create what we call an expense “payment set” composed of N1 reimbursable expense payments and N2 holdbacks. When managers create these payment sets, the affected users are now able to access the set details and see not only what they are being reimbursed, but also any reasons that affect reimbursement.
As mentioned earlier, we added a mechanism for holdbacks — used as a method to discourage expense violations. In the case we designed for, the client has a policy that the total of credit card expenses currently in technical violation (usually for lack of receipts) is eligible to be held back against reimbursements until the problem is cleared. It's early days for this tool (and the related policy), but I'm betting that the clear linkage of violation to funds being held back is going to make for a dramatic improvement in compliance.
Both manager and user can see a clear table of expenses that will be reimbursed and holdbacks that will be deducted from the payment. The user accesses via expenses:reimbursable expenses where a list of all expense sets are shown with full details on the expenses being reimbursed and any holdbacks.
v16.202 is a refinement on the concept of reimbursable holds. The idea of “holdbacks” arose from a client company where a policy was made that a hold would be placed on certain reimbursable expenses if the user failed to comply with the company's credit card policy. In the first part of this project, released as v16.199, we showed the reimbursable checks and the holds. What's different now is the idea that a manager of a reasonably high stature should be able to exempt a given expense from this test “ for example, if the circumstance is not the end-user's error.
Now, doing something like this requires a couple of layers. First, we have to define who's eligible to make exemptions. We're doing this with a new privilege, override expense rules which authorizes a user to exempt (and remove exemption on) expenses that would fail compliance testing. This is initially set for your level 9 users, but like any other privilege, a user administrator who has this privilege can grant it to another user.
Next, we added two fields to the expenses table. The first is a “signature” of the manager granting the exception, and the second is the reason for granting it. If both values are present, the exemption can be made with immediate effect.
This type of change is not affected by record locking because we're not really modifying the expense, but, instead, a flag affecting how problems with the expense are dealt with.
Exemptions are added with +exemption and removed with -exemption. These switches toggle off/on depending on the presence of an existing exemption, and can be found in the expense editing screen.
So what we have now is a transparent reimbursable expense processing system with holdbacks, plus an additional refinement that lets managers exempt expenses on a selective basis.