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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
- To
designate a set of guidelines for “executive” travelers. This group generally has higher expense
limits than “standard” travelers.
- 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:
- 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.
- Expense
Category – This matches the category field in the expense record.
- 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.
- Check
Method – These tell the guideline check process how to check an expense
item.
- Daily
– Check expense amount for any given day.
- Days
– Check the average expense amount over the purpose.
- Nights
– equals “b” minus one
- Report
– total amount of the report
- Line
– not currently used
- Total
–Check total of an expense category for the report
- Reimburse
– total reimbursement amount of the report
- Advance
– total advance amount on the report.
- Weekend
– replaces “a” for a weekend date.
- Date
– checks for old receipts
- 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.
- Warning
Message – Message that will display on the guideline check if guideline
check fails.
- 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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