ProOnGo Blog

If you’ve started to add your employees to ProOnGo Expense, you may be thinking one step ahead about the most efficient way to handle expense approvals. Although there is no “one size fits all”, there are four easy options to choose from. The right process will come from thinking about your team’s size, your expectations about how often you’ll need to deny an expense, and the amount of time you want to spend scrutinizing inbound expenses.

To get your team’s expense reports approved with a process that’s “right for your company”, consider the following four approval processes:

Expense approval in a small business is often more about getting the manager’s attention, and less about the scrutiny over the validity of the expense. With small business managers being split in a million directions – whether it’s fretting about the month-to-date sales totals, or cranking out the monthly financial reports, or preparing next quarter’s strategy — it’s a busy and sometimes hectic role.

So, when a manager finally has a minute or two to catch up on expense reports, we want to make that two minutes as productive and speedy as possible. We spend a ton of time making it easy to file expense reports, but there is also the matter of making it easy to approve expense reports, or perhaps more importantly, to know when there are expenses awaiting approval. Here’s how we do that at ProOnGo:

As always, we’re “all ears” when you think of new ways that we can help busy small business folks save time and be more efficient. Keep the feedback coming!

In the Fortune 500, it seems that the norm is for every senior manager or higher to be holding on to a corporate card, and for a well-defined (albeit perhaps archaic) expense reporting process to define the valid uses of that card. However frustrating, most of these companies seem to have expense policies the size of a short novel, dictating the “do’s and don’ts” of spending on the company’s dime. That makes it even more frustrating to fill out your expense report.

In comparison, in the world of small business, things tend to be a little more ambiguous. We hear from small businesses all the time who are trying to bring order to the chaos of having some employees submit reimbursement requests for out-of-pocket expenses, while other employees use a company-paid credit card, while the owner or owners perhaps use a debit card tied directly to the company’s checking account. Worse, the variations and combinations of these approaches lead to infinite complications for the CPA or ProAdvisor trying to sort it all out for financial reporting and tax accounting. Sometimes we think it’s a miracle that those accounting professionals can make sense of it all.

We’ve helped thousands of small businesses get to a sane, sustainable process for handling employee spend, but sometimes the first step is just starting to “track” what’s going on already. And at ProOnGo, we think small businesses deserve expense tools designed just for that level of flexibility. Here’s one more way we’re here to help with that…

The “I put it on the boss’s card” scenario

One of the most popular “bring order to the chaos” scenarios that we’ve heard from small businesses, is that sometimes the manager’s credit card gets handed around when someone else needs to go run an unexpected errand for the company. What happens next? Well, the expense is on the manager’s card, but the person who actually knows the details of the expense, is the person who borrowed the card. How does an expense like that get tracked correctly?

With ProOnGo, it’s easy. The manager can go into ProOnGo and find the expense (preferably sync’d into ProOnGo automatically, from QuickBooks’ Online Banking feature). Then, the manager can click on the “Delegate” button (meaning, “I’d like to delegate this expense”):

Delegating an Expense

Once the manager clicks on the “Delegate” button, a popup appears that shows the list of the manager’s employees, to whom the expense can be delegated:

Choosing an Employee to Delegate To

Once the expense is delegated to an employee, the employee can help fill in the blanks — helping to categorize, add or improve the memo, etc. After that’s done, the manager can even use the Delegate button to take responsibility for the expense again, if that’s desired (but that’s not the most important detail). What’s helpful about this approach, is that the expense gets tracked by the person that knows the most about the expense, even if the expense started out in the manager’s account.

Summary: even in the chaos of managing a small business, there is a way to bring order to the company’s expense reporting processes, and it doesn’t involve a novel-length expense reporting policy.

ProOnGo has a work flow designed especially with businesses in mind. Employees submit expenses to managers, who approve or deny the expenses. We know that isn’t always the end of an expense’s journey, though. Sometimes the manager has to submit to the CFO, or another manager. Then that manager sends the expense off to their manager, and so on until the expense finally gets reimbursed.

ProOnGo lets you add as many levels of management as you want.

Here’s how to use it:

Start at the Employees Tab of the web portal.

Click the bright yellow “Add Employee” button, and enter in your employee’s information. They’ll be asked via email to confirm.

By now you may have noticed the ‘Add Admin’ button in the Employees tab and are tempted to click on it. I should let you know that there’s a difference between a Manager and an Admin. An Admin has the same rights and access as the creator of the account, most notably access to QuickBooks information, whereas a manager has the power to approve or deny the expenses of only their employees.

Once you’ve created the manager and they’ve accepted your invitation to get access to the account, they can add employees under them by going to the settings tab and clicking the “Add Employee” button. If the employee under them also has employees under them, the setup is the same.

Or, you can add sub-employees to a manager’s account for them, by clicking the “0 Employees” button next to a manager’s name. From that screen, click the ‘Add Employees’ button and add an employee as you normally would.

Here’s a pro tip: If you go into the settings of an employee by clicking on the gear tab, you can set an “expense limit” for that employee. The amount you set is the amount up to which the employee doesn’t have to seek expense approval. Say you set the employee’s expense limit to $2500. He can approve his team’s expenses up to $2500 without getting further expense approval from you, his manager. Then you can send them straight to QuickBooks.

Now your managers have managers, and your employees have employees. Now go, start filing expenses!

Thank god you work in a small business, right? No bureaucratic hurdles to jump through just to be able to purchase some new coffee filters for the break room.

Unfortunately, most expense reporting software aren’t fans of this casual nature. It’s like every piece of software these days will not function unless you have a few yards of red tape you’re willing to string around the office.

Well, we here at ProOnGo understand that formalities might not always be necessary, and that what’s most important is getting the job done, not making sure you have followed all the steps.

That’s why we’ve given small businesses the option to ‘unformalize’ their expense adjudication. Adjudi-what? You know, approve or denying expenses.

If your small business expenses are hooked up with ProOnGo Expense, managers are given complete control over their employees expenses, and don’t have to wait on employees to ‘submit’ their expenses before they are included in an expense report.

With ProOnGo Expense, the manager just logs into the ProOnGo Web Portal and they instantly have access to their employees’ expenses. As the expenses are incurred by the employee, managers can edit, delete, approve or deny the expense, and populate it into an expense report.

So instead of waiting for employees to submit their expenses, managers just go and get ‘em. Stop wasting time and get your business running with ProOnGo Expense.

Many of our customers that come from other expense reporting solutions talk about the “black hole” that expense reports seem to go into, from the moment they are filed to the moment they are reimbursed.  Employees wait needlessly for expense reports to be processed/approved/denied, oftentimes with at best a murky picture of “which payroll run” the reimbursement might finally be included on.

ProOnGo can help.  If you are an employee submitting expense reimbursement requests through ProOnGo Expense, take a look at the Filter tab in the app, for an option that’s sure to give you the information you are looking for…

• Need to know precisely, in real-time, which expenses have been denied – so that you can clarify and resubmit?
• Need to know which expenses from your recent trip have been approved?
• Need to know your total “approved” T&E spend, year-to-date?
• Need to know how much money you have tied up in submitted, but not yet approved/denied, expenses?

For the answer to all of these questions, in real-time, tap the Filter tab and toggle on/off settings in the Expense States area.  Use it in combination with other filter settings (like date range, filter by category, etc), to get an even clearer picture.  Lastly, know that when you set the filter “just right” and return to the main expense list, the total sitting above the list will show the sum of just the set of expenses that you’ve filtered in on.  Enjoy!  Is your company still on an antiquated paper-based expense system?  Show your manager how easy expense reimbursement workflow can be, with ProOnGo.