Expenses

Unless expenses are handled by a third-party business suite, electronic expense management typically consists of filling in and submitting a monthly report based on an Excel spreadsheet template. This presents an obvious challenge to validate and to analyse submitted expense data.

Born Solutions has built a robust and scalable SharePoint-based expense system that uses Power Automate to process expense submissions and to handle expense report approvals. The data submitted resides in a customizable SharePoint list, so it can be used a data source for detailed reporting and data visualization, and so it can easily be integrated with your accounting system.

1. An employee incurs an expense and records in the Expense Items list on the intranet site, or from their mobile device with an option to take a photo of the receipt – that gets attached to the expense item.
2. At the end of the month, or perhaps at the end of a business trip, the batch of expense items are submitted together for approval.
3. Upon submission, an expense report is automatically created, and the expense items become read-only, and a link to the report is sent to the first approver. The approval process is customizable so it can simply be the employee’s manager, or it can involve others such as from the Finance department is the value exceeds a threshold.
4. If the expense report is rejected, the submitter can correct any issues and submit the batch again.

This expense system can be integrated with our travel request system such that if expenses for the trip exceed the travel budget, an additional level of approval is required.

Because the data now contained in SharePoint lists, it is easy to visualize it using PowerBI reports.