The Feature

Oracle Internet Expenses Has Grown Up

February 25, 2006 on 12:01 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Reviews | 56 Comments |

I recently had an opportunity to implement the new Internet Expenses application (10.5.10). I must say I liked what I saw! Anyone remembers Oracle Personal Time and Expenses (PT&E)? It’s a good thing if you don’t. The Internet Expense has matured into a nice, robust and stable application. The timing has worked in our favor, as we were able to utilize most of the new improvements.

What It Can Do…

Oracle Internet Expenses (iExpenses) is essentially an extension of Oracle Payables. It provides a way for employees and contingent workers to enter their expense reports. Employees and contingent workers become suppliers, and their expense reports become supplier invoices in Payables.

Integrate with Other Oracle Applications

Oracle Human Resources – for one database of valid employees and contingent workers
Oracle Payables for seamless and streamlined expense report payment
Oracle Projects – for billing to customers or internal tracking of costs
Oracle Approvals Management – for flexible approval rules
Oracle Grants Accounting – to charge expenses to awards for funds tracking
Oracle Time and Labor – for common user interface
Oracle Daily Business Intelligence – for expense analysis, Top Spenders report, and drill-down to line details

Expense Report Entry

Enter expense reports using a browser, a wireless web-enabled mobile device, or an offline spreadsheet
Enter expense reports on behalf of others
Enter expense reports for contingent workers
Pre-populate expense reports with credit card transactions
Itemize charge card or cash line items and assign multiple expense types; Enable automatic Hotel Folio itemization based on card feed
Allocate reports to many cost centers
Copy saved and submitted reports
Withdraw reports after submission
Require or enable projects and tasks
Require or enable category specific additional fields
Include advances and refunds as negative amounts
Default data based on user preferences, including from prior reports
Calculate mileage and per diem during expense entry or import of spreadsheet
View approval and payment status on the home page or using a Web-enabled mobile device
Automatically capture and manage expense receipts online
View notes, responses and actions in Approval Notes
View card transaction history, mark items disputed with card provider

Company Policy

Define company policy for online enforcement
Define exchange rate defaulting and tolerance checking
Require receipt by expense type and amount
Require justification by expense types and upon policy violation
Require receipt itemization and provide set of expense types for itemization
Configure descriptive flexfields or additional fields for expense types
Enable special messages or calculations on review, confirmation pages

Workflow Approvals and Notifications

Approve expense reports and associated receipts, flag policy violations, and enforce reimbursement policy
Review details of expenses with supporting receipt documentation on approval notifications
Optionally require manager and accounts payable approval by exception
Delegate or transfer approval authority, and handle vacations
Build flexible approval routing rules and conditions, including line-based and cost center-based approvals
Notify employees of policy violations, rejection or adjustments
Notify users of reimbursements and payments to card issuers on their behalf

Charge Card Administration

Define card usage and transaction submission policies for online enforcement
Identify employees with outstanding credit card transactions by details or aging
Automatically notify of unsubmitted card transactions, escalate as needed
Pay charge card issuer directly on behalf of employees
Use automatic new account registration
Map card types for expense type defaulting

… What is New n Release 10.5.10

Expenses Home Page. The Expenses Home Page allows users immediate access to a variety of expense reporting information, workflow notifications, and their corporate credit card account information. It is a nice “portal” where employees can see and manage all expense reports. Employees are alerted to changes and transactions that require their attention and these items are highlighted and linked, so that they can be addressed in a timely and efficient manner. When you click on the Internet Expenses responsibility link, you are taken directly to the Expenses Home page. Because you can access all functions from the Expenses Home page, there is no longer the need to show a list of menu items.

Expenses Home

Contingent Workers. It was about time! Non-employees, such as contractors and temporary workers, can now enter expense reports into Oracle Internet Expenses. You set up contingent workers in HR, and associate them with their Vendor record. The service providers who employ them are then paid directly through Accounts Payable. Contingent workers can also be set up to approve reports, enter reports for others, and audit reports.

Expense Allocations. You are now able to manually override accounting information (for non-project expense lines only!).

Future-Dated Expenses. Expenses process owners can use the setup utility to define whether future-dated expenses should be treated as warnings or errors during expenses entry. This ensures that expenses are not entered into inappropriate accounting periods, which causes reimbursements to be delayed and accounting to be incorrect.

User-Interface Enhancements. Several usability enhancements were made, including browser Back button support and bubble text. In addition to the Internet Expenses Back and Next buttons, you can now use the browser Back button to go back and make changes while entering an expense report, unless the report has been submitted or items were deleted. Bubble text was added for buttons and icons.

Other improvements include:

Enhanced Approval Rules using Oracle Approvals Management
Enhanced Approver Entry
Enhanced Adjustment and Short Pay Process
Enhanced Expenses Itemization
Paperless Audit Rules
Audit List Rules
Manager Reporting
Improved Workflow Notification

… And What It Could Do Better

Improve the Offline Expense Report Upload Importing the Offline Spreadsheet is clunky, prone to errors, unintuitive, and most users stay away from it. How about a WebADI like looking upload, which validates against valid projects, tasks and expense types? Clients also ask for ways to customize the offline spreadsheet so that they could input company logo, expense policy, etc.

Provide Valid Alternative Approvers Only. The list currently shows everybody in the employee-supervisor hierarchy. Employees can chose Override Approvers, who are not defined as approvers in Payables, and hence, expense report submissions fail. This can be avoided by simply limiting the list of employees in the Override Approver field to valid approved in Payables.

Detail vs. Summary Expense Entry – it would be nice to be able to switch the default expense report layout between summary and detail.

Provide a List of Override Cost Center Values. Users can currently enter only cost centers, but they are unable to choose them from the list.

Expense Report Printing Printing an expense report does not fit to a page! There are a couple of Metalink notes out there, but no solutions. Please fix this!

Provide customizable views to limit the list of projects, tasks and expenditure types (similar to OTL views).

Improve AME Why provide yet another tool to make the applications work? Why not use Workflow instead? While is is a great idea to provide additional options for expense report approvals, the current AME is far from being the “robust tool forline-based and cost center-based approvals “.

Provide a better solution for CEO Expense Report Approval. The default approval workflow uses the supervisor hierarchy to approve expense reports, i.e. everybody needs a supervisor in order to approver expense reports. Assigning a dummy employee to be CEO’s supervisor is not a good solution.

Allow Cross-Charge between multiple business units for project-related expense reports by engaging Account Generator, even if the initial combination of employee’s default company and override cost center is invalid.

Manage Attachements. Provide a better way for iExpenses Administrators to manage (view, save, print) expense report attachments.

Provide a way to change project-related information for submitted expense reports before they get imported to Payables.

Provide Direct Deposit Integration with 3rd Party Vendors. Not as much iExpenses feature, but a requirement for better integration with Oracle Payroll, or other Payroll providers like ADP and PeopleSoft. Companies need to be able to reimburse expense reports via direct deposit without replicating bank and bank account information in Oracle Payables. Most employees now have their paychecks deposited directly, and expense reports should be paid the same way.

Additional Information

Check following resources for additional information about Oracle Internet Expenses:

Oracle Internet Expenses Datasheet (a .pdf file) available at Oracle Applications Home page. Below I provide excerpts from the datasheet.
Oracle Internet Expenses Implementation and Administration Guide

Share your experience with Oracle Internet Expenses. What is your favorite feature?

Find this and similar articles in iExpenses.

56 Comments »

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Hello Marian,

I would like to know the auditing feature in iExpense. The steps to use it. I know the old method of approving it from core apps. But i am not able to really figure out the proper steps of using the audit manager resp and approve the expense reports. for some reason they always error out.

If you have some kind of document other then standard oracle guide can u pls. mail it to me.

thanks,
chandan

Comment by Chandan — September 27, 2006 #
Hi Chandan,

Thank you very much for reading The Feature. I am sorry to hear you are having problems with configuring the audit functionality in iExpenses. What are you trying to do – use a paperless audit, or approve expense reports using the Auditor responsibility? What kind of error did you get?

Generally, I found the iExpenses User Guide quite useful, if not very intuitive.

Marian

Comment by Marian Crkon — September 29, 2006 #
Trying to find out if a PO can be created and then an expense report matched to that PO after it has been created in iexpense and transferred to AP. Tried it in a test instance and couldn’t get it to transfer to GL. thks.

Comment by Julie — January 30, 2007 #
Hi Julie,

I am not sure trying to match an employee expense report to a PO makes much sense. POs are typically issued to order goods or services from “standard” suppliers. Is this an expense report for a contingent worker?

As for transferring the expense report to GL, make sure the invoice is validated and accounted for.

Marian

Comment by Marian — January 30, 2007 #
iExpenses needs capability for handling disputed credit card transactions. A card transaction will go through invoicing, payment and then bank rec. At any stage it could be disputed and payments may be reimbursed, requiring in a reversal of the expense entry for that transaction. The contra entry to make will depend on the stage the transaction is in.

I find nothing in the documentation for that. Is the functionality there? And does anyone have experience coming up with technical solutions or business processes for managing disputes?

Comment by Nick — April 20, 2007 #
Nick,
Thank you for stopping by. I am not aware of how OIE handles disputed credit card transactions. I am hoping that somebody who knows will provide an answer to your questions. Good luck!
Marian

Comment by Marian — April 20, 2007 #
Hi,

How can I get a sample file for Credit Card Transaction data to load and check the internet expense.

cheers,
Ranen

Comment by Ranen — May 17, 2007 #
Hi ,

I need to know that how to chnage the AP SHORT PAID Notification Text which goes to Creator of Expense Report when the Expense Report is Short Paid?

This is very urgent.

Kindly help me out .

Thanks in Advance.

Regards
Abhishek Mishra

Comment by Abhishek Mishra — May 31, 2007 #
Is anyone approving the expense report notifications via a mobile device? Please share your experiences. What is the notification type being used. What types are devices are you using? Were there any additional setup to do this?

Comment by Patrick Gresham — June 1, 2007 #
We are using both Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices to perform online approvals as well as iExpense notifications. The trick comes with configuring the user accounts to accept certain types of email.

Within the Preferences of the iExpense (or other web-enabled app of the eBusiness suite), set the Email Style under the Notifications to ‘Plain text mail with HTML attachments.” This is so that the NID (unique identifier) comes through correctly.

After the user changes their notification mechanism, the devices will now see the request for approval notifications. Once the email arrives within the device, the user will need to be very specific about the response. Oracle will only accept certain textual responses. They are:

Approval Action: “Approve”
Approval Action: “Reject”

Careful with this though – the default response is to Approve. Ensure that your security is tight on the devices (password, locking, etc) so that not just everything gets approved.

Comment by Chris Smith — June 19, 2007 #
Hi Abhishek,
As far as I know, short paid expense report is an expense report of negative or zero amount. Oracle applications automatically creates a new expense report for short paid expense report. This new expense needs to be processed.

Hope it helps.

Thanks and regards,
Indira Shukla

Comment by Indira — July 10, 2007 #
Hi

1. We would like to go to Level 3 Itemization i.e., enables automatic Itemization not only hotel but also Car Rental and Airfare etc.,

2. We got a XML versionfile from our card provider

3. We are able to create itemization successfully. But when we are creating the expense report, the expense type is not recogized correctly.

Could you please tell me why the expense type is not recognized??

Thanks
Ravi

Comment by Ravi — July 12, 2007 #
We are in the process of upgrading to 11.5.10 [11i.OIE.J(3618125)] and I would like to use the Amex Upload and Auto Card Creation feature available for Amex in a Multi-org environment. Is there any whitepaper that explains what set-up is required for each org to implement? Is there any additional documentation relating to such a config?

Comment by Bryan English — October 3, 2007 #
Bryan,
There is a white paper called “How to Set Up Amex Credit Cards for iExpenses available on Metalink > Knowledge Base > Internet Expenses > White Papers.
Marian

Comment by Marian — October 3, 2007 #
Hi Marian,
Thanks for the feedback. I had already spotted that one but it didn’t cover Data Retrieval and Auto Card Creation in a Multi-org environment. The I-Expenses manual does discuss this but left me unclear, hence my original question.

Comment by Bryan English — October 5, 2007 #
Hi

We have a Airway Bill Account bill which is the total bill of all air tickets that are booked and billed each month for employee travel. Right now this is done manually, cost center by cost center, for all of the travel, which is sometimes >$350K a month.
A friend of mine tells me that she has American Express send her an Excel spreadsheet containing specific information, like passenger name, cost center, ticket number, cost, etc. and that by some “magic” their Accounting group uploads the data right into the GL’s (they use Oracle back office).

Can someone give me a clue as to how we can set this up? We currently load the amex file into oracle which has the employee cr. card txns.

thanx
Lakki

Comment by lakki — October 26, 2007 #
Hi,

1.I want to know hom many companies are using oracle internet expenses. Can somebody let me know some big companies using it.

2. is there any major advancements in it.

Comment by tulsi prasad sahu — November 20, 2007 #
is there a way to show on what date and specific time an expense report was withdrawn?

Comment by Brad Ryan — December 24, 2007 #
does anyone know if workflow approvals works via company webmail if not on a vpn or in office?

Comment by Amy — December 31, 2007 #
Amy, the workflow is using employee email addresses stored in HR assignments. And yes, it could receive messages from outside the firewall.

Comment by Marian — December 31, 2007 #
Hi Marian

i like to know about how iExpense automatically assignes the credit card to Employee ..Is there any concurrenct prgram available for that …

thanks
balkrishna

Comment by balkrishna — January 14, 2008 #
Balkrishna,
This is done as part of the credit card setup for employees. The best place to start will be the iExpenses User Guide. Sorry.
Marian

Comment by Marian — January 15, 2008 #
Can anyone tell me why instead of an employee’s name, the sstem displays something like PER_ROLE XXXX where XXXX is the employee ID? Thanks.

Comment by Dee — February 13, 2008 #
Can Oracle Internet Expenses be utilized as an expense reporting solution without implementing other Oracle apps? If not, what Oracle apps do I need in order to run Internet Expenses.

Comment by Paul — June 11, 2008 #
No, not really. iExpenses is really just an extended functionality of Payables. It also requires some key HR pre-requisites…

Comment by Marian — June 11, 2008 #
Marian:
We like to use Internet Expense and currently on 10.5.10.2. Has the import/export spreadsheet features improved since your writing? I have been told to avoid implementing spreadsheet.
Any suggestions on how to pre-approve expenses before the trip?
Thanks,
LS

Comment by LS — January 14, 2009 #
Is there any way to record a prepayment or advance payment to an employee in Internet expenses?
Or any other process in Expenses where in employees can raise a request for advance payment that later on needs to record as Prepayment Invoice in Invoice Workbench.

Thanks
Ranjeet

Comment by Ranjeet — February 17, 2009 #
Hi

Can you please let me know what is mean by common policy .And can we use multiple policies for one org.We have expense type Meals ,We have attahced country specific policy .But most of the employee travels across world and policy is diff .Can we impliment this .

Comment by balkrishna — March 3, 2009 #
How can an expense report be matched to a requisition (funds reserved for that purpose)?

Comment by Alok Ojha — March 12, 2009 #
Hi,

Can anyone help me out,how and where exactly is the setups for aging the credit card transactions done.

ex:’number of transactions more than 365 days on your card :45.please include them in your expense report,before submitting a new one’.

where can these type of setups be done?

Thankx in advance,
Swetha.

Comment by swetha — April 17, 2009 #
Hi,
Im setting up the OIE, everything works good, except for one user, he can´t see the notifications on the OIE Homepage, but he can see them from the System Administrator Responsibility.

I review everything, and I dont know where the mistake is.

Can anybody help me….

Thanks

Comment by Cynthia — May 14, 2009 #
Cynthia,
Make sure the user is also a correct workflow user, i.e. his user name is attached to an employee record, his name is not attached to multiple users, and that he has a valid email (if email notifications are enabled). Also make sure to run the synchronize workflow role process, which validates these settings.
Marian

Comment by Marian — May 14, 2009 #
Hi,
Does anyone have expertise in implementation of the Internet Expenses Module of Oracle E-BS with Peoplesoft?

Comment by Madhuri — July 22, 2009 #
Hi,

Are you using the Spreadsheet? If so, which version of Office are you running? Any errors? We are having issues with Office 2007.

Comment by Kelley — January 11, 2010 #
Hi,
Can I have one employee with 2 credit cards in different orgs (multi org environment)? If possible just give me an idea of how to do this.
Thx

Comment by Theo — March 4, 2010 #
Theo,

That’s an interesting question; I don’t know the answer. I would doubt it since employees are business group specific. I wonder if anyone out there know a workaround?

Marian

Comment by Marian — March 23, 2010 #
Is there any way to record a prepayment or advance payment to an employee in Internet expenses?
Or any other process in Expenses where in employees can raise a request for advance payment that later on needs to record as Prepayment Invoice in Invoice Workbench.

How can an expense report be matched to a requisition (funds reserved for that purpose)?

Comment by Alok Ojha — March 12, 2009

Hi Marian,
Had you got chance to ponder over these two earlier questions, our requirement is also same.

Omi.

Comment by Omi — March 31, 2010 #
Assume AP close is on 31-MAR but gets delayed to APR-2. if you enter an expense report with expense start date of 30-MAR, 31-MAR, 01-APR, 02-APR, 03-APR will it split the transactions to the same GL month as the expense start date.
thank you

Comment by Ashok — April 5, 2010 #
Marian, I have read through this blog but haven’t seen my exact question – occasionally a feed will come through that was paid months previously, or so reports our users. My question is: Is there a way to delete a credit card charge from your Unused Charges? As close as I have gotten is to submit them as Personal and they will be taken out of your queue but not paid by the company. Do you have a better solution?
Thank you!

Comment by MiChelle — May 18, 2010 #
Marian,

We pay employees an Upfront amount say 150 Dollars. Later the employee submits bills for 120 dollars and we collect the remaining 30 dollars from him.

Can I 1) Enter negative amounts as advances 2) Import a Credit Memo as part of the Expense report import process and collect a refund?

Comment by Kartik — May 26, 2010 #
I notice that your comments all seem to come from folks implementing this application in their organizations. I’d like to offer a comment from the perspective of an employee trying to file expense reports on iExpense. What iExpense does in linking to AP is obvious and benefits the organization. How it does this is typical of Oracle eBusiness – clunky, slow, very demanding of the network, not user-friendly, and full of “features” that seem not to allow the organization to de-select them. Example: the link to the employee’s corporate credit card is typically implemented requiring expenses incurred on the card to be checked off and charged to a cost center. Well and good, except that expenses incurred on the card may not post to iExpense immediately, causing delays (the policy being that if an expense is incurred on the card, it must be checked off from the card’s transaction register, not simply entered as an expense). There could be a toggle to turn off this feature, but in the Oracle one-size-fits-all mindset, I suspect there isn’t.
As an overall comment, iExpense seems to be pitched as an efficiency, when I suspect a true accounting of employee versus back-office time spent on making sure data entry integrity is preserved would show it actually is an inefficiency.

Comment by Chris — May 26, 2010 #
I would like to know, what options are being used for submitting receipts when using iExpense. I’ve heard that some companies require the users to scan and attach the receipt to the iExpense report, what are some other options that companies are using for sending required receipts?

Comment by JD — June 8, 2010 #
Any ideas regarding handling aging Card transactions in 11.5.10 ?. The reports provided are not functional. If you have implemented any solution like workflow notifications, escalations or addressed this process wise like automated notification escalations of 30+, 60+ aging etc, appreciate your feedback.

Regards/PR

Comment by PR — June 24, 2010 #
Oracle Implementation Guide has mentioned that Internet Expense can be submitted using Mobile Devices. Does it require VPN connection first, and then access the internet expense by logging into Oracle Application, select the Internet expense responsibility, create expense report and then submit the the report, the same kind of access like when we want to access Payables? Or is it like iSupplier Portal, which supplier can access with DMZ without having to connect to VPN first. Some of foreign sites have problem accessing via VPN.

Your feedback is much appreciated.

Thanks,
LS

Comment by LS — August 2, 2010 #
Does anyone know where the internet expense report derived from and can it be changed. For example, the newly submited expense report has a number of 145678, can I change it to start 1000?
Thanks!

Comment by LS — August 3, 2010 #
LS,

You you the Expense Report Numbering Client Extension to create your custom expense report numbers. You would need to modify the PL/SQL function AP_WEB_OA_CUSTOM_PKG.GetNewExpenseReportInvoice.

Marian

Comment by Marian — August 5, 2010 #
I would like to know from which table I can get the Auditors detail for the expense report submitted using i-Expense

Comment by Punit — August 12, 2010 #
@Punit – What auditor information are you looking for? There is the AP_NOTES table which provides some auditor information.

Comment by MAS — August 24, 2010 #
@LS Aug 3, 2010 – The expense report number is created by a sequence. The sequence name is AP_EXPENSE_REPORT_HEADERS_S. The value of the sequence can be altered; however, once the expense report number has been generated and inserted into the AP_EXPENSE_REPORT_HEADERS_ALL table I would NOT recommend changing the value in that table via SQL.

Comment by MAS — August 24, 2010 #
Does anyone know the table or tables which hold the Locations and Rates data (per diems)? I have loaded over 400 locations and rates and need a listing of the information. Oracle, in it’s infinite wisdom provides poor reporting capabilities.

Comment by MAS — August 24, 2010 #
Hi Marian,

I have an issue related to the expense status code. The status is not getting reflected correctly once the invoice is paid in payables. Om metalink it refers a bug for which Oracle provides onetime data fix also. But I would like to know that how it is getting updated in iExpense? Is there any PL/SQL procedure or any scheduled concurrent program which updates the status to paid/partially paid.

Regards
Prakash Kumar

Comment by Prakash — September 14, 2010 #
Hi

Does anyone know how to upload per diem rates for CONUS/OCONUS locations into iExpenses. We are using Oracle 12.1.2. I tried uploading the rates by placing the file in the path specified in UTL_FILE_DIR parameter in the init.ora file. Then I ran the upload program from iexpenses Setup and Administrator menu. It keeps erroring out with the following message “This request finished with an error and produced the following completion message: AK_INVALID_FILE_OPERATION (PATH=/usr/tmp) (FILE=oconusnm.txt) The processing began on 22-NOV-2010 15:42:54 and ended on 22-NOV-2010 15:42:55. You may find more information on the cause of the error in the request log or the concurrent manager log.”

Any help in fixing this issue will be highly appreciated.

Thanks
Arun

Comment by Arun Minnasandran — November 23, 2010 #
Make sure you upload the rates file to the right server. I’m still trying to nail this down, but I had success once by putting the CONUS rate file on the file server, whereas the OCONUS rate file had to go on the database server. Today I’m trying to repeat that experience and nothing is working, so there’s something else going on that I haven’t figured out.

Comment by Mike Williams — December 16, 2010 #
Thanks Mike
Actually we solved this problem by placing the files on the right server. Infact our DBA’s know where they should go but incase you are not sure just place the CONUS and OCONUS files on both the Apps and DB servers. That should do the trick for you.

Arun

Comment by Arun Minnasandran — April 6, 2011 #
I was on a project last year for another ERP package which was to ensure that credi card information such as CC# were SOX compliant. That is, the number cannot and must never be visable or stored. How is iExpense addressing this SOX issue? This would also apply to banking info.

Comment by Maureen — January 27, 2012 #
I just found a PCI compliance/Oracle white paper that addresses the issue I posted.

Comment by Maureen — January 27, 2012 #

Oracle Internet Expenses Has Grown Up

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