An employee policy determines the settings made available to a group of employees. An employee policy determines:

• categories: the categories available to people to select.
• expense rules: the expense rules used to calculate expenses for those people.
• per diems: applicable per diems at a global level (irrespective of border crossings)
• mileage: applicable mileage rates at a global level (irrespective of the employee’s mileage counter)

It can be used in companies where company policies have different rules for different collectives. For example, per diems that calculated differently for executives compared to individual contributors, or mileage allowances that change depending on whether the employee belongs to one department or another (e.g. Sales compared to Procurement).

Caution: If you add a new per diem rate, category, expense rule or mileage rate, you need to remember to assign it to the employee policy. Otherwise, it won’t be applied to employees despite being active.

Enable employee policies

Policies are enabled at company level and apply to all employees associated with that company.

Note: You can choose whether to use employee policies in your company. However, when you enable them, you must select one for each person.

1. Go to Settings > Account > Companies, select a company, and then scroll down and click View spend settings.
2. In Compliance, select the checkbox Enable employee policies.

The Employee policies setup can now be accessed under Settings > Expense settings. 

Determine a default employee policy

Once employee policies are enabled, everyone must be assigned to a policy. This means you must provide a valid employee policy ID when importing people from third-party solutions (or via the Perk API). Some solutions may not provide this information. Therefore, as a workaround, you can assign a default employee policy that is used where the integration fails to include an employee policy for the person.

Caution: If you import people from another solution, make sure to assign a default policy. Otherwise, people are created with an inactive status. Before you can select a default policy, you need to have created a policy.

To set a default policy:

1. Go to Settings > Account > Companies, and select View spend settings.
2. In Compliance, select the employee policy you want to use by default where the policy ID is not provided.
3. Click Save.

Add a new employee policy

In Settings > Expense settings > Employee policies, you can view all employee policies set up for the company. You can associate as many categories, expense rules, mileage rates, per diem rates, and tags as you want with a policy.

Employee policies are created at company level. If you want to apply a similar policy in several companies, you need to create separate employee policies (and the corresponding categories and expense rules) for each. You can download the specific configuration of a policy by clicking the Download icon.

By default, you view active policies for the company. However you can select whether you want to display active, inactive or drafted policies in the Status dropdown list.

Before you start to create a policy, make sure you have set up any categories, expense rules, mileage rates, per diem rates and tags first, as these items are required for the policy. If you add new categories, expense rules, mileage rates, per diem rates, or tags after creating the employee policy, you need to make sure to remember to associate them afterwards. Otherwise, people won’t be able to see and use them even though they are active.

If you need to change the details of a policy, click on the policy and change the applicable settings. Once created, you cannot delete a policy. Policies are maintained for audit purposes. You can deactivate a policy as required by clicking the Deactivate icon.

1. Select the company
2. Click + Add new policy. Alternatively, you can import several policies at once.
3. Enter the policy configuration.
4. Click Save to keep a draft or Activate to make the policy available for selection.

Import employee policies

To import multiple policies simultaneously, click Import file in the top right corner of your screen. A window appears where you can download an example CSV file.

The CSV file contains the same fields as that for creating a policy manually, with an additional ID field for the policy’s unique identifier. You don’t need to enter an ID as this is automatically generated when imported.

Perk supports CSV files with UTF-8, UTF-16, and ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998 (Latin1) encoding.

Once you entered all required data in the CSV file, click Import file in the top right corner of your screen and select the company entity you want to apply the changes to. Click Choose file to upload your CSV file or use the drag-and-drop function to drag the file directly into the field. To finish the process, click Start import.

Once the import has finished, you can download a report that helps you troubleshoot any errors.

Assign an employee policy to a person

To apply the rules to a group of people, you need to select a policy in their person profile.

To do this:

1. Go to People
2. Click on an employee.
3. Go to the Organization tab. 
4. In the Policies and approvals section, in Employee policy select the policy for the person.
5. Click Save.