This article is part of the Commercial Rewards Card paid plan guide. You can navigate back to the guide with the previous link and take the next onboarding steps.
Purpose
This article describes how to manage the TravelBank default expense policy and how to create custom expense policies for your organization.
Audience
This article is directed toward administrators with a paid TravelBank expense and travel management account. It also applies to Commercial Rewards Card program administrators on a paid plan.
Overview
The TravelBank default expense policy allows you to set guidelines for your employees and take control of spend by adjusting receipt requirements, mileage rates, and other settings.
Manage your organization’s default expense policy
To access your organization’s expense policies, from the TravelBank left navigation menu, select “Company Settings” > “Expenses” > “Expense Policy”
Select “Default Policy”.
Within the default policy, you can make changes to several areas:
General Rules: Set receipt requirements, approval steps, and more for all expenses.
Category Rules: Define rule sets and guidelines per specific expense categories.
Approval Rules: Modify report approval flow based on report custom conditions.
Reimbursements: Set whether employees in this policy will be reimbursed, and, if so, when and how.
Employees in Policy: All employees are part of the default policy unless they have been added to a different policy. Employees can only be in one expense policy.
When you make changes to a section on the Default Policy page, select “Save” before making changes to the next section.
Note: Employees can only be assigned to one expense policy.
General Rules
The following table describes the fields in the General Rules section.
Table 1. General Rules fields
Field | Description |
Receipt Requirement | This field allows you to set the dollar amount at which employees must attach receipts to their expenses. While this is an open field we recommend setting it at $75.00 USD.
Default: The TravelBank recommended $75.00 USD |
Mileage Reimbursement Rate | The field is the multiplier that is used to convert employee-submitted mileage to dollars for reimbursement. You can set a custom rate or use the IRS rate. The IRS calculates the IRS rate, and the rate goes into effect on the first of the year and is updated annually.
Default: IRS rate; the rate is set |
Description Requirement | When this field is enabled, employees are required to add a description to all of their submitted manual expenses. Mileage expenses will always require a description.
Default: Off |
Corporate Card | When this field is enabled, expenses are nonreimbursable. Turn this field on if employees use a corporate card. These expenses will not be reimbursed.
Default: On
|
Split Department Access | When this field is enabled employees can assign expenses to any department, not just departments to which they are assigned in the employee directory. Let employees select any department for split. When off, employees may only select from their assigned departments.
Default: Off |
Category Rules fields
This area of the expense policy allows you to define rule sets and guidelines per specific expense categories. All of your expense categories appear in the Category Rules window. If you have added custom expense categories to the default categories, those added categories will also show as available for all policies by default. If you have not set up any custom expense categories, the following default categories are all enabled.
Airfare
Conference
Employee Morale
Entertainment
Ground Transportation
Lodging
Marketing
Meals
Mileage
Other
Parking
Phone
Rail
Supplies
Select “Edit” at the right of the Category Rules section and then “Set Rules” for each expense category” to make changes to the category rules. For each expense category in the Category Rules section, you can adjust the following rules (Figure 1):
Per Expense Limit: This rule allows you to set spending limits for individual expenses within the category. You can turn this rule on or off, and if it is turned on, you can set the spending limit.
Recurring Spend Limit: This rule allows you to set spending limits for recurring expenses within the category. You can turn this rule on or off, and if it is turned on, you can set the spending limit and the time frame for the limit (that is, daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly; for example, $500.00/monthly).
Require Expense Splitting: This rule allows you to require employees to split an expense by categories to account for all line items. When this rule is turned off, splitting is optional.
Once you make your needed changes, select “Save Policy”.
Figure 1. Set Rules options for each Category Rule
Approval Rules
In this area of the expense policy you can determine who should approve incoming expense requests for this expense policy (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Approval Rules section of Default Policy
Default: One approval flow: First–Any Added Approvers, Then–Manager, Lastly–Finance
Edit an approval flow
Select “Edit” to the right of the approval flow to edit the flow. This brings up an “Edit Approval Flow” window (Figure 3). When you’ve finished making changes to the approval flow, select “Save” and then “Save” again on the Default Policy page.
Figure 3. “Edit Approval Flow” pop-up window
Add an approval flow
You can also add an approval rule by selecting “Add”. This brings up an “Add Approval Rule” pop-up window (Figure 4). If you select “Amount”, you can add an amount. If you select “Category”, you can select a category from a dropdown list of your organization’s expense categories.
Figure 4. “Add Approval Rule” pop-up window
Reimbursements
This area of the expense policy allows you to turn on reimbursements to reimburse expenses in this policy through TravelBank.
If reimbursements are turned on, you can add a company bank account and a reimbursement schedule. Reimbursements can be run daily, monthly (1st), and semi monthly (1st and 15th).
Default: Off
Employees in Policy
This area of the expense policy allows you to manage which employees the policy applies to. Employees can only be assigned to one expense policy, and, by default, all employees are part of the default policy unless they have been added to a different policy. If you add an employee to another expense policy, the employee is automatically removed from the former policy.
You can also change an employee's Expense Policy from the Employee Directory.
Default: All employees
Create and manage custom policies
Similar to Travel Policies you can set up custom policies for special teams or groups and select which employees the policy will apply to.
Create a custom expense policy
You may find it helpful to review the default expense policy section of this article before you create a custom policy. That section describes the various areas that you can manage for the policy. Custom expense policies have the same areas as the default policy, but you can modify the areas to have a custom policy that’s different from the default policy.
Keep in mind that employees can only be assigned to one expense policy. If you add an employee to a policy, the employee is automatically removed from any other policy the employee was previously assigned to. If you remove an employee from a policy, the employee is reassigned to the default policy. Also be aware that you cannot reassign an employee if the employee has active reports.
To create a custom expense policy, take the following steps.
From the TravelBank left navigation menu, select “Company Settings” > “Expenses” > “Expense Policy” > “Add Expense Policy”.
Add a policy name in the “Add Policy Name” at the top of the page.
Adjust the various policy areas as needed, selecting “Save” after making changes in each area.
Once you’ve finished making the needed changes to the custom expense policy, select “Finish”.
Reimbursements by policy
When you create a custom expense policy, you can set the policy reimbursement rules so you can reimburse on a policy-by-policy basis. However, keep in mind that you can assign each employee to only one policy.
Review the following Table 2 for examples of custom policies and reimbursement rules for each policy.
Table 2. Reimbursements by policy examples
Policy name | Employees policy applies to | Reimbursement policy rules |
Policy A | Employees in Seattle |
|
Policy B | Employees in Portland |
|
Policy C | Employees in other areas and who need to be paid semimonthly |
|
Policy C | Employees that use a company card for expenses and have no need to be reimbursed |
|
Delete a policy
To delete an expense policy, take the following steps:
From the TravelBank left navigation menu, select “Company Settings” > “Expenses” > “Expense Policy”.
Select the policy you want to delete.
Scroll to the bottom of the page, and select “Delete Policy”. This brings up a confirmation window.
Select “Delete Policy” to confirm your selection.
Need help?
If you need help, contact the TravelBank support team:
Email support@travelbank.com.
From the website or mobile app: Open the left navigation menu and select “Chat with us”.
Publish date: May 26, 2021
Last update: May 7, 2024