Managing Expenses

Admin Guide

We are excited that your team has chosen to partner with TravelBank to power your expenses. Below is a quick user guide to help you get started.

Create Your Account

To get started, check your email for a message from TravelBank asking you to activate your account. If you don't see one, send an email to implementation@travelbank.com and we will send over an invitation.

Once you follow the link in the email and complete the setup questions, you are good to go!

Employee Management

Adding Employees

Head to Company Settings > Employees to begin managing your employees in TravelBank. The Employee Directory is where you can add, edit, and deactivate all employees and departments in TravelBank. To get started, you can either begin adding your Departments via the "Add" button found at the top right of the page, or use our template to upload both employees and their associated departments all at once.

For each employee, you will be required to add FirstName, LastName, Email, and can optionally add the email of their manager (or whoever is their primary approver), EmployeeID, Department, TravelPolicy, ExpensePolicy, and PrimaryDepartment if they are assigned to multiple. You can also determine advanced permissions, such as whether or not they are an Administrator or a Finance approver.

Best Practice Tips: Once you add or import an employee, it will trigger an activation invite to your end users. It is advised to setup your employees as 'Save for Later' or if you are using the import file to hold on importing users until you have fully configured your site and are ready for them to access TravelBank.

Adding Delegates

Once your employees are added to the system, you can also create host-delegate relationships. Delegates are able to login to their hosts profiles to help book travel or complete expenses on our web platform. To add delegates, go to Employees > Delegates > and from here you can add/remove delegates to host profiles. You may also use the import file to bulk import host and delegate relationships.

Best Practice Tips: Users should be loaded into your site and have activated their user accounts before establishing a host and delegate relationship.

Expenses

Now that you have created your employees and departments, you can start modifying your expense policy configuration.

Adding Categories/Accounts

First, head to Expenses > Categories to add your GL Accounts (called Categories in TravelBank) to the system. If you are integrating your account with QuickBooks Online, NetSuite, or Xero, you can skip this step. We will automatically port over your Chart of Accounts from your accounting software when you set up that integration.

From this screen, you will be able to add or disable your GL Accounts. When you add an account, you can provide both a Category Name, which is displayed to your employees for selection from a list, and an External Account ID, which lives in a separate reporting column to map back into your accounting software for reconciliation.

Best Practice Tips: Create only the expense categories that your employees will use. You can include the External Account ID in the label of the expense category if you would like your users to be able to search by either the category name of accounting ID.

Custom Fields

If you have any custom fields used in your expense or transaction management process, you can add these under Expenses > Custom Fields. Common fields we see are Job Code, Project ID, Customer, Location, etc. These fields become visible for employees on the expense creation cards once they are capturing and submitting expenses or coding credit card transactions.

You can configure these fields to be required or not, open text/picklist, and you can have up to 5 custom fields that show up on every expense. You can also configure custom fields to only appear when there is a specific Expense Category selected for that expense, and you can have an unlimited number of these category specific custom fields.

Expense Policy

TravelBank allows you to create as many Expense Policies for your team as you need. Under Expenses > Expense Policy, you will see Default Policy already built and added to the system. Use this policy as the master policy, as all new employees will automatically be added to it unless you manually assign them to an alternative policy that you create.

Expense Policies are split into three sections:

  1. 1.General Rules: including receipt requirement threshold, mileage reimbursement rate, description requirement, whether or not this group of employees has a corporate card, and whether this group of employees allocates expenses to more than one cost center/department
  2. 2.Category Rules: these are GL Account level policy flags that will alert approvers of any out of policy spend. If an employee breaks a rule (e.g. you only allow $100 a month for Cell Phone expenses, but an employee submits $150) then the approvers will see that flagged during their approval process in TravelBank
    Note: You can also activate and deactivate expense categories that might not be relevant to users who are assigned within specific policies
  3. 3.Approval Rules: expense report approval flows are defaulted to first route to a manager approver and then a finance approver, but you can customize your approval paths based on amount, category, and more

Once your policy rules are built, click Save and the new rules will be reflected immediately for any new expenses that are submitted by your team.

Exporting Expense Data

TravelBank allows you to export your expense data at any time via our Expense Export, found under Expenses > Expense Export in Company Settings. From this screen, select the export date range for the expenses, filter for what you want to see in the export, and drag and drop/edit column header names before downloading your data.


Reimbursements

TravelBank allows your team to reimbursement employees for out of pocket expenses at no additional cost. All reimbursements are run as ACH deposits, and if you select our Daily schedule, employees will get their funds back one business day only after the report has reached its final approval. You can also schedule expenses to be reimbursed twice a month, or once a month.

Be sure to instruct your employees to add their bank info under My Account > Expenses in order to receive their funds in a timely manner. If they forget to add their account info, we will send them a notification when we first try to deliver a reimbursement to their account.

Note that all reimbursements are pulled from your company bank account on a per-expense report basis, not as a batch. To reconcile your bank statement, we recommend you export your expense data and summarize based on the report name to match the outgoing amounts against the relevant employee expense reports.

After you've added your business bank account, you'll need to go into your expense policies to enable the account for reimbursements to users within that policy by going to Company Settings > Expenses > Expense Policy > Select the policy > Reimbursements - Edit > Toggle On > Select Bank Account and Reimbursement schedule.

Corporate Cards

TravelBank has numerous options for syncing corporate card feeds into our system. If you are on a small business program such as AMEX Business, Capital One Spark, Chase Ink, or other similar programs, you can use our API sync powered by Plaid to add your card to the system and assign cards to employees to code their transactions. If you choose to integrate your small business card program, reach out to your assigned implementation specialist or implementation@travelbank.com to enable this feature for you.

If you are on a corporate or commercial card program, we will work with your bank to set up a card feed directly. Typically this process takes two weeks from when you request a Data Release Letter from your bank to send your card info to TravelBank. You can work with our implementation team to begin this process by sending an email to implementation@travelbank.com or to your assigned implementation specialist.

You Have Completed Your Initial Expense Setup!

As a next step, you'll want to make sure you attend an Implementation Walkthrough to speak with a live implementation specialist who can ensure your setup meets your business needs

Questions?


Chat with us in the app or email support@travelbank.com