Expense reimbursement service

Before

Before implementation an employee (a requester) fulfilled an excel document of expense report by hand, had it printed and brought it to an accounting department with other supporting documents.

All abroad expenses were converted into dollars according to the corporate exchange rate by a requester itself.

An accounting department checked the documents out and in case they were wrong gave them back to the requester. If the documents were correct the accounting department sent them to a financial controller for visaing. After the accounting department added the docs to SAP so that the requester got its expense reimbursement.

As a result, it caused following difficulties:

• It was impossible to complete the process under conditions of distant work and lockdown.
• Accountants spent too much time checking paper documents out.
• Employees made mistakes fulfilling expense reports.
• Employees sent incomplete documentation.
• An employee had to present at the office to correct a mistake.
• There was a possibility of documentation loss.

Solution

• Single Power apps application for a requester and a coordinator.
• Validation of data provided by employees.
• Currency conversion via Power Automate. Integration with the OANDA international service.
• Storage of supporting docs in SharePoint Online.
• Automatic expense report generation.
• Expense reimbursement requests approval with email notifications about their status to a requester and an approver.
• A requester and an approver communication right in the app.
• All documents attached to the application are automatically formed into a single pdf-file, convenient for check-out by a financial controller.
• Built-in change tracking in requests and documents.
• Role-based access control.
  

After

Every employee participating in the process is working in the single Power App built into Microsoft Teams:

• An expense reimbursement request can be sent remotely.
• The strain on the accounting department is reduced: employees ask less questions on request’s making.
• An employee makes a request three times faster due to automatic currency conversion and a report generation.
• A number of mistakes has been decreased as the system controls all provided data and prevents wrong one appearance.
• Thanks to prompts on fulfilling requests almost all of them are approved on the first attempt without any additional docs.
• All the requests’ data (including supporting docs) is held in the centralized database with changes history.

Roadmap

• Integration with Shift Management System — automatic requester’s shift data receiving.
• Integration with Business Trip Management system — automatic data receiving on requester’s business trip.
• Integration with SAP ERP — expenses report data sending to SAP.