The Feature

How to Customize Oracle iExpenses Workflows

January 4, 2007 on 8:55 pm | by Marian Crkon | In How To Guides | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Here is a couple of examples of how to customize Oracle Internet Expenses workflows. You may need to change the seeded expense report notification routing or expense report approval method.

Changing Receivers of Certain Notifications

We wanted to re-route some notifications from the seeded performers (users, responsibilities, people) to a new performer (group of users). We created a new Oracle user with a new email distribution list as follows:

• Define a new OIEADMIN Role. As System Administrator, complete the following steps, create a new Oracle user
• Assign desired responsibilities to user OIEADMIN
• Run the Synchronize Local WF tables process every time you make changes to user setup.

Define Workflow Notification Performers

Perform these steps in Oracle Workflow Builder to set up/change expense report performers. These steps include recommendations for which item attribute to use for each notification.

• Load OIEADMIN Role. From the Files menu, select Load Roles from Database.
• In the Role Selection window, query the OIEADMIN role.
• From the Query Results region, select the required roles and click the Add button to add the role to the Loaded Roles region. Click OK to save the loaded role to the database. Save your work.
• Assign Role to the attribute: From the Navigator window, open the attribute. In the Navigator Control Properties, under the Attribute tab the Type in the main region should be set to Role. In the Default region, select the proper Value (role) and click Apply. Save your work. Assign a role for each of the attributes listed in the Performer Definitions table below.

Define Notification Performers. For each notification outlined in the Performer Definitions table below:

• Open the appropriate workflow process.
• In the workflow process, open the notification.
• In the Navigator Control Properties window, click the Node tab.
• Set Performer Type as Constant instead of Attribute.
• Choose OIEADMIN as Value.
• Click Apply and save your work.

Note: To directly link a role to a notification, Set Performer Type as Constant instead of Attribute. Then, select the role OIEADMIN. By using the Constant type, you have more flexibility. The table below lists the notifications, the seeded performer for each workflow process, and new performer

Change the Find Approver Method

Perform these steps in Oracle Workflow Builder to change the Find Approver method.

• Open the ‘Expenses’ item type from the database
• In the Navigator window, expend Expenses and Processes folders.
• Open (double-click) the manager (Spending) Approval Process
• Open the Find Approver function
• In the Navigator Control Properties window, click the Node Attributes tab.
• In the Value field, select your approval method (e.g. One Stop Then Go Directly)
• Click Apply and save your work. Click OK to save the workflow file to the database.

Foresee Those Future-Dated Expense Report Items

November 14, 2006 on 10:18 am | by Marian Crkon | In Feature of the Week | 6 Comments |  Print |  Email

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

Favorite Fusion Features – Internet Expenses

June 11, 2006 on 7:51 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Ideas and Opinions | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Which features would you like to become your favorite features in Oracle Fusion? If you are an expert user with real-life, hands-on experience and have ideas on how to improve the applications; if you had to customize a module to get the features you need, or additional functionality would save you time and money, submit your strategic requests via the OAUG Enhancement Request System (ERS) today! As an Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) member and/or Oracle Applications user, Oracle is requesting your feedback on strategic improvements to current Oracle E-Business Suite functionality for their initial Fusion releases.

Alternatively, if you want to get involved but don’t know how, if you are not an OAUG member, or none of the available options works for you, then let’s also try something different. Let’s keep a weblog of improvement tips, enhancement requests and your best features in Oracle, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel applications you want to have in Oracle Fusion. Let’s have discussions about what enhancements and features make most sense, and then log Fusion Requests before the Oracle’s June deadline. There won’t be any wrong questions or bad ideas (or at least, we’ll let the “group intelligence” decide). Your involvement can be as easy as providing comments with your ideas to this post.

Below is a list of improvement tips and enhancement ideas based on Oracle Internet Expenses 11i.10 as submitted by Oracle users at the OAUG Enhancement Requests portal. Use the portal to provide you own enhancement requests, or submit comments to this post to do the same.

• Offline Expense Report Upload. (OAUG Login required). Improve the Offline Spreadsheet Upload process. The existing functionality (OIE 11i.10) is clunky, prone to errors, and unintuitive. And you cannot upload expense item details if you require them for specific expenses types. An upload from an offline spreadheet is a great idea, for the reasons above, most users stay away from it. Provide a WebADI like upload, which would validate cost centers, employees, expense report templates, projects, tasks and expense types against the database? Clients also ask for ways to customize the offline spreadsheet so that they could input company logo, expense policy, etc.

• List of Alternative Approvers. Provide a valid list of expense report approvers. The current list shows everybody in the HR employee-supervisor hierarchy. Employees can choose Alternative Approvers who are not defined as approvers in Payables, and their expense report submissions fail. This can be avoided by simply limiting the list of employees in the Alternative Approver field to valid approvers in Payables.

• Usability Improvement in the Create Expense Report: Cash and Other Expenses View. Provide an option to switch the default Create Expense Report: Cash and Other Expenses view between Summary and Detail. Also, provide an option to let users resolve their expense report line errors in a separate window without scrolling through all expense report lines to find the ones, which failed.

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

• Expense Report Printing. Printing expense reports does not fit on any standard paper size (e.g. 8.5 x 11). Since most people are required to provide a printed copy of their expense report with their receipts, this is a major pain in a butt.

• Project Online Validation Views. Provide customizable views to limit lists of projects, tasks and expenditure types (similar to OTL views).

• Improved Approval Management. Provide a better tool to define different approval rules including line-level approvals, project manager approvals, or other types of approvals, which would not require HR supervisors. The current AME tool (11i.10) is far from being the “robust tool for line-based and cost center-based approvals” as the data sheet boasts.

• CEO 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. Allow cross-charge between multiple business units even if the initial combination of employee’s default company and override cost center is invalid with an override cost center.

• Project-Related Expense Allocations. Enable an option to review and adjust distribution lines for project-related expense reports BEFORE they get submitted.

• Better Way to Manage Expense Report Attachments. Provide a better way for iExpenses auditors to manage (view, save, export or print) expense report attachments. Currently, administrators do not see whether expense reports have line-level attachments until they actually open each expense report.

• Project-Related Expense Report Adjustments. Provide a way for expense auditors to change project-related information for submitted expense reports before they get imported to Payables.

• Expense Auditor Veto. Provide a way for expense report auditors to reverse approver’s approval and return the expense report into a ‘Rejected’ status.

• Direct Deposit Integration with 3rd Party Vendors. Provide direct deposit integration with 3rd party payroll 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.

• Expense Reort Payment Remittance E-Mail Notification. Provide email notification when expense reports get paid (same as currently available for credit card payments).

Which features would you like to become your favorite features in Oracle Fusion? Granted, it may take two years before you get them, if ever, but this is your opportunity to provide your own improvement ideas and enhancement requests. The voting to determine “best features” starts in July 2006.

Using Expense Cost Center in Project Expense Report Account Generator

June 5, 2006 on 9:02 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Feature of the Week | 3 Comments |  Print |  Email

The Feature

You may encounter this feature if using Oracle iExpenses, Payables and Projects 11i.10. When creating project-related expense reports (invoice type = Expense Report) directly in Payables, Oracle uses the same Project Expense Report Account Generator process as used by iExpenses.

You might have a problem with populating the Cost Center segment during account generation if you use the Expense Cost Center attribute (Override Cost Center field from the expense report header) in your account generator definition. When expense reports are created or adjusted directly in Payables, the Expense Cost Center is not a valid source attribute in Account Generator, and account generation fails.

The Workaround

When creating expense report distribution lines in Payables, bypass the use of Account Generator by populating the GL Account fields first, saving your changes, and only then populating the project related attributes (project, task expenditure type and expenditure date).

How to Get the Expense Report Template Details

May 8, 2006 on 10:13 pm | by Marian Crkon | In How To Guides | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Here is an ad-hoc query you may use to get the expense report template details from Accounts Payable, including the mapping of expense type names to GL accounts and project expenditure types. As of 11i.10, it is not possible to export this data from the Expense Report Templates form, nor there is any report that would provide this information. It is nice to have this listing in Excel when reviewing the expense types, making chart of account changes, or updating your accounting rules.

Expense Report Template Details Query

How To Use Oracle Personalization Framework to Customize Fields and Messages

April 18, 2006 on 2:42 pm | by Marian Crkon | In How To Guides | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

You can use Oracle Personalization Framework to customize standard fields and messages in web-based Oracle modules (iProcurement, iExpenses, iStore, etc.). Here is one example of personalizing expense report fields in iExpenses to make them more intuitive to the end users.

Move the Details Image – Update Expense Report: Cash and Other Expenses Page

1. As System Administrator: Set ‘Personalize Self-Service Defn’ to Yes.
2. Log out of the system.
3. Navigate to Expenses Home page using your iExpenses responsibility
4. Create and submit an expense report
5. In the Update Expense Report: Cash and Other Expenses page, click the ‘Personalize Business Expenses Table’.

6. In the Choose Personalization Context page, click Apply.
7. In the Personalization Structure page, click on Reorder next to the ‘Table: Use this table to’ item.

8. Click on Personalize under the Function section
9. Move Details item up right under Line item. Click Apply.

10. In the Personalize Region page, click Return to Application.

Hide the Itemize Image

11. …continued from Step 10 above.
12. In the Update Expense Report: Cash and Other Expenses page, click the ‘Personalize Business Expenses Table’.
13. In the Choose Personalization Context page, click Apply.
14. In the Personalization Structure page, click on Edit next to the Image: Itemize item.
15. In the Personalization Properties page, select False for the Rendered row at the Function: OIE Expenses Entry Flow level, then click Apply.
16. In the Personalize Region page, click Return to Application.

Hide the Line – Level Attachment Image

17. …continued from Step 16 above.
18. In the Update Expense Report: Review page, click the ‘Personalize Other Expenses Table’.
19. In the Choose Personalization Context page, click Apply.
20. In the Personalization Structure page, click on Edit next to the Column: (AttachmentsColumn) item.
21. In the Personalization Properties page, select False for the Rendered row at the Function: OIE Expenses Entry Flow level, then click Apply.
22. In the Personalize Region page, click Return to Application.

Move the Details Image – Create Expense Report: Cash and Other Expenses Page, Mileage Tab

23. …continued from Step 22 above, the personalization framework is still enabled.
24. Click on Mileage Expenses tab.
25. In the Mileage Expenses window, click the ‘Mileage Table’ link.
26. In the Choose Personalization Context page, click Apply.
27. In the Personalization Structure page, click on Reorder next to the ‘Table: Use this table to’ item.
28. Click on Personalize under the Function section
29. Move Details item up right under Line item. Click Apply.
30. In the Personalize Region page, click Return to Application.
31. Continue creating the expense report.

Move the Details Image – Create Expense Report: Review Page, Business Expenses Table

32. …continued from Step 31 above, the personalization framework is still enabled.
33. In the Business Expenses table, click the ‘Personalize Other Expenses Table’ link.
34. In the Choose Personalization Context page, click Apply.
35. In the Personalization Structure page, click on Reorder next to the ‘Table: Use this table to’ item.
36. Click on Personalize under the Function section
37. Move Details item up right under (DateColumn) item. Click Apply.
38. In the Personalize Region page, click Return to Application.
39. Continue creating the expense report.

Personalize Submission Instructions

40. …continued from Step 39 above, the personalization framework is still enabled.
41. In the Confirmation page, click the Personalize Submission Instructions Header link in the Submission Instructions region.
42. In the Choose Personalization Context page, enter Your Business Group name in the Organization field and click Apply.
43. In the Personalize Region page, click Personalize for the Raw Text item.
44. In the Personalize Raw Text page, select False for the Rendered row at the Site level, then click Apply.
45. In the Personalize Region page, click Create Item for the Header: Submission Instructions item.
46. In the Create Item page, select the ‘Raw Text ‘ value from the Item Style list.
47. Complete the page according to your business requirements:
a. ID = YOUR_COMPANY_SUBMISSION_INSTRUCTIONS
b. Text: Include your customized message here.
c. Click Apply
48. In the Personalize Region page, click Personalize for the message you created.
49. In the Personalize Raw Text page, enter a message in the Text field for the appropriate level, then click Apply.
50. In the Personalize Region page, click Return to Application.

How Account Generation Really Works in Oracle iExpenses

March 10, 2006 on 9:43 am | by Marian Crkon | In Feature of the Week, How To Guides | 4 Comments |  Print |  Email

Speaking about features and idiosyncrasies, let’s talk about how the accounting flexfield is generated in Oracle iExpenses (10.5.10) when employee submits his or her expense report. For simplicity sake, let’s assume the expense report does not have any multi-currency or credit card items. And as example, let’s assume we are using a simple chart of accounts containing of three segments:

Company-Cost Center-Account

Our employee belongs to company 100, and cost center 1000. Oracle iExpenses follows these steps to generate his account during the expense report entry:

Step 1: The Default Expense Account Defined in employee’s HR assignment:

100-1000-55555

Step 2: Employee enters the Expense Report Header. If he does not override the Cost Center, iExpenses proceeds to Step 3. If he does override the Cost Center (e.g. 2000), Oracle iExpenses builds an initial accounting combination of his Default Expense Account with his new Override Department.

100-2000-55555

The Feature: If this initial combination is invalid, employee will be able to proceed with the expense report entry but the report submission will fail without notifying the employee and regardless what the employee enters below!

Step 3: Employee enters expense line with an expense type (e.g. Airfare=50050) and no project. The system generates the expense line accounting flexfield. If project and task are entered, the system proceeds to Step 5:

100-2000-50050

Step 4: If Expense Allocations functionality is enabled, employee can change the above expense distribution for each line (e.g. 200-2222). If the above expense combination is invalid and the employee does not update it, the expense report submission will fail.

200-2222-50050

Step 5: Project and Task were entered at the expense line level: iExpenses will engage the Account Generator, and will follow its rules to update the initial combination, and build the new one. For example, let’s say the Company is derived from Project Organization (Seattle=100), Department from Override Department above (2000), and Account from Expense Type (Airfare). The resulting accounting combination will look as follows:

200-2000-50050

Implementation Tip: Define one Default Expense Account to be valid across all combinations of companies and cost centers, which will be used in cross-charges.

Hope you will find this information helpful. We did not have much luck trying to figure this out using the available Oracle resources.

Provide comments, or contact me at marian.crkon@itsafeature.com if you have any questions.

How To Set Up Oracle iExpenses

March 6, 2006 on 10:55 pm | by Marian Crkon | In How To Guides | 104 Comments |  Print |  Email

Here is a summary of steps to set up Oracle Internet Expenses. iExpenses is basically an extension Oracle Payables. Employee and Contingent Worker expense reports become supplier invoices and get paid from Payables. You will need following responsibilties to set up Internet Expenses: Payables Manager, Internet Expenses Setup and Administration, System Administration, Application Developer, and AX Developer. If you are also planning on charging expense reports to projects, you will also need Project Billing Super User and General Ledger Super User responsibilities. You will also need access to Oracle Workflow Builder to customize the Expenses workflow and Project Expense Reports Account Generator.

Continue reading How To Set Up Oracle iExpenses…

Oracle Internet Expenses Has Grown Up

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

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.

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.

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.