Reviewing expenses, trips, and invoices is key task for financial reviewers. You need to ensure that the submitted documents match policies, look out for potential fraud, and ensure employees and suppliers are reimbursed on time. To review expenses, go to Finance > Review > Expenses and invoices to see all expenses that need to be reviewed.

Depending on your company settings, you may see:

• All expenses, trips, and invoices that have been submitted and are approved by previous approvers.
• Only expenses, trips, and invoices that have been submitted and are approved by previous approvers but include a warning.
• No expenses if your company’s finance review strategy is set to Fully automated review in the spend settings for your company (Settings > Account > Company > View spend settings, Approval and finance review).

To review an expense report, you need to:

1. Select a company and spend type.
2. Review an expense report.
3. Finish your review.

Select a company and spend type

Depending on your role, you may have access to several companies (legal entities). The spend types are grouped into one of three tables in this page:

• Expenses tab: You see all single expenses that have been previously submitted and approved and are ready for review.
• Invoices tab: You see all invoices that have the status In review.
• Trips tab: You see collections of single expenses incurred while traveling, which have been submitted and approved and are ready for review.

Use the Spend type dropdown option in the top right corner to switch between the spend types.

Note: You may not see the Trips and Invoices tabs. These tabs are only displayed if trips and invoices are enabled for your company.

Tip: You can use filters to narrow down the report(s) you want to review. See Filtering reports in Review.

If there are no spend documents to review for the selected spend type, then a message is displayed.

Review an expense report

When opening an expense report, check whether all information is correct and adjust if necessary.

As a finance user, you can change these fields depending on the expense type:

Caution: If the expense was paid with a credit card, the fields relevant for the matching such as payment method and company card cannot be modified. To edit certain fields such as currency or expense amount, you must first unmatch the expense from any card transactions.

For trips, you can view the trip information, download a PDF of the trip itinerary or any attachments. You can either review each individual expense, mileage claim and per diem separately or review all included expenses in a single action by clicking Finish review (all). 

For the trip itself, you change all trip fields, including the itinerary, to the current or past date. When a change is made to a trip, Perk automatically recalculates any automatically generated expenses. The newly generated expenses are automatically moved to the In review status. All the manually added expenses stay as is and don’t change status.

When reviewing per diems as part of a trip, you need to bear in mind that the date can’t be changed as it is taken from the trip dates.

Caution: If the trip contains an already exported expense, you can’t edit it.

When reviewing the report, there three possible scenarios:

• If you are unsure about some of the details and want to check with colleagues before proceeding, click Save to save the report so you can come back at a later point in time to finish reviewing it. The expense/invoice remains in In review status.
• If you are unsure about the purpose of the expense or need to change one of the grayed-out fields, you can click Send back for clarification. A reason for sending back expense reports is always required. After the report is sent back for revision, the submitter needs to make adjustments in their report, starting the entire approval flow again.
• If the amount, currency and/or date needs to be changed, you need to click Unmatch to unmatch the expense report and the card transaction first before sending the report back to the submitter to change relevant matching fields.

If your Perk admin has configured expenses to display tax amounts, you can review and adjust the tax rate(s) and number. The tax rate(s) and numbers are automatically extracted by Perk. Therefore, make sure to check them and correct if necessary.

If the company has been set up to allow posting dates other than the current date, then you can view and modify the posting date of an invoice. The posting date determines in which period the transaction is posted to.

Finish your review

After you’ve verified the information in the report, you can mark the expense, invoice or trip expenses as ready for export by clicking Finish review. Trip expenses must be also individually reviewed before they can be sent for export as a collection.

Once expense reports, transactions, and invoices are ready for export, they are automatically moved from the Finance > Review > Expenses and invoices to Finance > Review > Export.

Note: Learn how to use Finance > Review > Export. See Export reviewed spend.