The Feature

Conversations with iExpenses Users from Avenue A | Razorfish

February 10, 2006 on 12:30 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Conversations | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

We sat down with a group Oracle iExpenses users from Avenue A | Razorfsh (expense auditors, administrators, project managers, expense approvers, and expense prepares) to learn about their experiences with using iExpeses. Overall, the feedback was very positive. There were things people liked and did not like. Following is a summary of our conversations.

Sue: As we are preparing to start another project to implement iExpenses for the rest of the company, we wanted to get your feedback on what works and does not work for you guys after 4 months of using it.

Steve: This may be surprising, but I do not have any complaints. iExpenses is pretty easy to use. I submit my own expense reports and approve them for other people. I like the email notifications and save them all in a separate Outlook folder. I miss a notification telling me about my expenses reimbursement check being deposited to my bank account (Editor’s Note: Employees have payments deposited to their accounts by ADP). Also, it is confusing sometimes to know what fields are required, or not, when entering expenses. Some expense types require more details, some do not. You have to manually open the Details page to find out. Printing a hard-copy expense reports is also a challenge. It does not fit on a sheet of paper.

Matt: I also enter my own expenses and approve them for other people. I am glad we now have one system and one process for entering both billable and non-billable expenses. It took some time to get used to a new process, but overall, it is working fine now. Oracle is not very intuitive. I really like email notifications. As a project manager, I need a better way to report on people’s billable expenses. We used to get an Excel report with unbilled expenses from the old system.

Sue: You should have access to Expenditure Inquiry in Projects, which should give you that information.

Marian: We also created a new Discoverer report for unbilled expenses. We need to talk about who should have access to it.

Skip: Like my colleagues before me, I also enter my expense reports and approve them for others. I think iExpense is very easy to use. I like the email notifications. It is especially great for my group because they work at different client sites, often without having a VPN access. I like things like being able to attach attachments, provide additional comments, or request additional information. I like the ability to ask for more questions. I was wondering if it was possible to request more information at the line level? I like to approve several expense reports at once from my Worklist, and it was not very apparent to me how that worked. I also wasn’t sure about where to provide comments when I reject an expense report. For phase two, I would recommend to engage actual users with real-life scenarios.

Nancy: Let’s switch gears and talk with the “back-office” users about their experiences with expense report processing.

Peter: I am what you would call an iExpenses Administrator. I review and audit all expense reports, and process them through Payables. For me, it has been great to be able to consolidate three legacy expense reporting applications to two (Concur and iExpenses). We still have one to go. I like the new Internet Expenses Auditor responsibility. It gives me a nice way to search for and manage expense reports. I noticed that sometimes Workflow does not consistently update expense report status. Approvers may say they have approved an expense report, but it does not show as approved in the system. I wonder if some approval emails do not make it back to the system. I instruct the approvers to re-approve such expense reports from their Oracle Worklist. Also, I’ve had hard times managing attachments. Users are not using this feature consistently. Attachments can be attached either at the header or the line level of the expense report. The header-level attachments are visible in the auditor report list , the line-level attachment s are not , so each report has to be opened individually to see if attachments have been added . It is a very time consuming process to find them, save the billable reports to the local folder and print them. It would be nice if the auditor windows and email notifications indicated there were attachments attached to expense reports. Recently we had a spike in a number of failed expense report submissions due to invalid accounting flexfield. From January 1, we had some chart of accounts changes that were not communicated well to the field. We are getting more invalid combinations of the company and department.

Sue: It may be a good idea to send out a monthly newsletter with current information and tips on how to use the system. We do not want people to feel like it is a black box.

Erica: This will be even more critical during the second implementation phase when we need to support expense entry across business units. Currently, project-related expense reports fail, if the initial combination of employees company and override cost center are invalid. The system does not even get to engage the Account Generator. There is a pending enhancement request with Oracle for this issue.