Guidelines Explained

March 28, 2006

Copyright 2006, R. James Holton. All rights reserved.

 

 

ESS guidelines

 

Guidelines are a method of quantifying a travel policy.  They consist of established spending limits that can then be compared against reported amounts.  Based on these comparisons, routing and approval decision are made.

 

Guidelines can easily be maintained by account and administrative personnel.  However, they have been included in the “Professional Services Manual” because they are usually setup when the system is first installed. 

 

How guidelines are used

 

Guidelines are used to:

 

  1. Compare expenses on a report to established standards.  Managers and auditors can use this comparison to make approval decisions.  Expense report presented to managers and auditors display an “Expense Guidelines” section that compares the report’s expense to the guidelines.
  2. Route reports to specific processing steps based in whether a report passes or fails a guideline check.  If a report fails one guide check in its group, the report fails.
  3. Remove a user from a general process and assign them to a more stringent process.  This is done by creating a more stringent guideline and assigning the user to that process.

 

Guideline Groups

 

Different groups, or sets, of guidelines can be applied to different users.  Guideline groups are defined with the Guideline Group field.  Only one group of guidelines is used for any one user.  Normally multiple groups are used for one of two reasons:

 

  1. To designate a set of guidelines for “executive” travelers.  This group generally has higher expense limits than “standard” travelers.
  2. To track problem travelers by assigning them to a “special” group.  Since guidelines can be used for routing, reports matched to extremely low expense limits are guaranteed to follow routing paths that can be specially monitored.  Routing rules can be setup to allow managers, administrators or auditors to review these reports and at the same time let non-problem reports to zip through the system.

 

Assign Guidelines to users

 

Users are assigned to a guideline group with the “Guideline Group” field on the “User Primary” screen.

 

The “Guideline Group” dropdown list is populated from the Audit Profile JavaScript file.  If a new guideline group is added to the GUIDE table, the profile generation process needs to be run before it will appear in the “Guideline Group” dropdown list.

 

Tailor guidelines

 

ESS comes with expense guidelines that can serve as a basis for your guidelines.  These guidelines enforce corporate policy by flagging reports that don’t meet policy to approvers and auditors.  The system will also use the guidelines to route reports based upon compliance.  The guideline screen contains the following fields that can be modified to meet your needs:

 

  1. Guideline Group – Each user profile specifies a guideline group to use for compliance checking.  It is possible to have more that one group defined for your company.
  2. Expense Category – This matches the category field in the expense record.
  3. Location – Matches against the report location field.  A blank location is the default.  This allows you to set different rates against different cities.  For example, you might allow $90 a night as a hotel room in Topeka, KS, while you may allow $200 a night for a hotel room in Boston, MA.
  4. Check Method – These tell the guideline check process how to check an expense item.
    1. Daily – Check expense amount for any given day.
    2. Days – Check the average expense amount over the purpose.
    3. Nights – equals “b” minus one
    4. Report – total amount of the report
    5. Line – not currently used
    6. Total –Check total of an expense category for the report
    7. Reimburse – total reimbursement amount of the report
    8. Advance – total advance amount on the report.
    9. Weekend – replaces “a” for a weekend date.
    10. Date – checks for old receipts
  5. Limit Amount – amount used in the check method.  For the date method this is the number of days old.  This would be the amount that you allow. 
  6. Warning Message – Message that will display on the guideline check if guideline check fails.
  7. Company – not really used.  Select any available company to pass check if edit is enforced.

 

Example of Policy

 

Let’s use the example of a hotel room.  The company has decided that an employee that is traveling is allowed to spend up to $120 a night for a hotel room, except if they are visiting Kansas City.  In Kansas City they are only allowed to spend $75 dollars a night, unless they are an executive in which case, they can spend $77 a night. This policy can be “described” by creating four entries to the Guideline table.  The entries and the important elements for each are:

 

  • Guideline Group = ‘Standard’, Expense Category = ‘Lodging’, Location = blank, Check Method = ‘Nights’, Limit Amount = ‘120.00’
  • Guideline Group = ‘Standard’, Expense Category = ‘Lodging’, Location = Kansas City’, Check Method = ‘Nights’, Limit Amount = ’75.00’
  • Guideline Group = ‘Executive’, Expense Category = ‘Lodging’, Location = blank, Check Method = ‘Nights’, Limit Amount = ‘120.00’
  • Guideline Group = ‘Executive’, Expense Category = ‘Lodging’, Location = ‘Kansas City’, Check Method = ‘Nights’, Limit Amount = ’77.00’

 

Assign all executives to the ‘Executive’ Guideline group.  Everyone else gets assigned to the ‘Standard’ group.   Assign a reporter to the proper group by updating the “Guideline Group” field in the “Primary User” record.  The location is entered by the reporter when they create a report as part of the report purpose.

 

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