Foresee Those Future-Dated Expense Report Items

November 14, 2006 on 10:18 am | by Marian Crkon | In Feature of the Week | | Print This Post

You can encounter this feature when using Oracle iExpenses, Payables and Projects 11i.10.

The Feature

Oracle iExpenses 11i.10 lets you enter, approve and pay expense report items with incorrect dates in the future. I was asked by my client today to look into expense report items rejected in the Payables to Projects interface and to my surprise, there were several project-related items in Payables with item dates in the future. The item date is entered by employees when entering their expense report line items. I believe the dates were in most, if not all cases entered in error [and against the expense reimbursement policy].

The Interface Expense Reports from Payables to Projects process checks for, among other things, the following conditions:

  • Expenditure Item Date is within an active employee assignment
  • Expenditure Item Date is within an active project (and task) date range
  • Expenditure Item Date is within an open or future PA Period in Projects
  • Expenditure Item is charged to a project in an active status.

Now, this validation happens online during expense report entry and approval, but it happens again several days, or weeks, later during the Payables to Projects interface process. This is after the expense report had already been entered, approved, imported into Payables, validated and accounted for in Payables, and in many cases, already paid, and after some of the original conditions may have changed. Since these are the invoice line item dates, not invoice dates, it is very difficult for Expense Reports Auditors, or Payables, to catch these. Furthermore, once invoices are validated and accounted for, they cannot be updated.

The Workaround

As of OIE.H or higher, you can use the Future-dated expenses feature. You 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 billing to be delayed and accounting to be incorrect.

To set the future-dated tolerances, log in with Internet Expenses Setup and Administration responsibility > Expenses Setup > General > Options. On this page you can define future-date tolerances for each operating unit. Individuals can submit future-dated expenses according to the values you specify.

If you did not set these tolerance limits and want to see whether any future-dated items exist in your system, use the ad-hoc query below.

Future-Dated Expense Report Items

6 Comments »

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  1. Hi Marian,

    I have couple of questions first PA/Oracle Assets:

    Que 1: amortization_start_date to a past period date before running the post the post mass additions program ?
    I think there this will impact the depreciation calculation, is my understanding correct?

    On OTL

    Que2: Is there option to correct employees’ timecards after he/she has been end-dated (Terminated in Oracle HRMS).
    Clearly reverse termination is not an option as it will have implications on the TAX reporting etc.

    Please can you share your thoughts

    Thanks
    Shree

    Comment by Shree — November 15, 2006 #

  2. Hi Marian,

    I have couple of questions first PA/Oracle Assets:

    Que 1: can amortization_start_date be updated to a past period date before running the post the post mass additions program ?
    I think there this will impact the depreciation calculation, is my understanding correct?

    On OTL

    Que2: Is there option to correct employees’ timecards after he/she has been end-dated (Terminated in Oracle HRMS).
    Clearly reverse termination is not an option as it will have implications on the TAX reporting etc.

    Please can you share your thoughts

    Thanks
    Shree

    Comment by Shree — November 15, 2006 #

  3. Hi Shree,

    Answer 1:
    The Date Placed In Service will impact depreciation, and it can be in the past. Oracle Assets will calculate the “catch-up” depreciation for the missing months.

    Answer 2:
    What do you mean by “correcting’ employees time cards? In general, you can still process employee’s transactions (e.g. timecards and expense reports) after hes or she was terminated, provided that the changes are within the employee’s HR assignment effective dates.

    Marian

    Comment by Marian — November 15, 2006 #

  4. Thanks for your response Marian.

    Correction to employee’s timecard will in correction to the overtime worked by employee on a particular day especially during the last week in office.

    OTL has been configured with Payroll layout, daily overtime is captured under “Overtime element” which is getting its input from an custom timecapture screen on weekly basis.

    The timecard data will be available in OTL only the next week after the weekly upload manager would look at the timecard and approve or correct the overtime and approve for that employee.

    By this time Oracle HRMS has already processed employee termination so the manager would not be able to see the employee under his hierarchy.

    Hence problem.

    Comment by Shree — November 16, 2006 #

  5. Hi all,
    I have a query. Is it possible to create a PO against a future dated approved Project?
    My system is stopping me to save such a PO.Could not find anything in Metalink.
    Any help will be appreciated.

    Thanks,
    Ranajay

    Comment by Randas — April 20, 2007 #

  6. […] Find future-dated expense report items entered incorrectly in the future. Prevent this problem by setting the respective OIE options. […]

    Pingback by The Feature » Sample Ad-Hoc Queries for Oracle Financials — January 31, 2008 #

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