Audience: All Users

Purpose

In this article, we will provide a high-level overview of the expense timeline. 

What is the Expense Timeline?

The Expense timeline has been designed to put the user in context of the End to End expense process.  Keeping you informed of what has been done, and what needs to be done to a business expense.  It represents the stages that all expenses must pass though in order for them to be processed by your business.  This process includes 5 stages, illustrated below in the expense timeline

• PURCHASE to spend money
• JUSTIFY money you have spent
• APPROVE expenses for your team or Cost Centre / Department / Project you are responsible for
• REVIEW expenses that have been flagged for financial audit (policy breach or for tax management review)
• PROCESS expenses from the platform in to your finance and / or payroll system (if you have enabled the API connectors this stage will happen in real time automatically).

A visual representation of this timeline appears on most views in the Platform including the Dashboard.  It also presents a counter of the number of expense transactions at each stage.  Each user can see the count and status of expenses in a role based context: End users can see their own expenses, Managers that have staff reporting to them as defined in the user’s profile can see the status of their team’s expenses, Finance and Administrator roles can see the expenses for the entire business.