For certain expenses such as meals, your company may need to track the employees and guests covered by the expense for multiple reasons:
- company policy: check that the expense complies with the set budget per person.
- per diem impact: check that employees have deducted the corresponding meal from per diem amounts for the day.
- country requirement: provide a list of participants and company affiliation for all meal expenses (e.g. required in Germany).
Participants in expenses
Perk lets submitters indicate the participants in an expense, selecting the people who were covered by the expense and specifying whether it is a Perk person or a third party person. You can determine the type of participant that people can select in an expense and the information required to create an external participant.
Perk displays a breakdown of the expense by the number of participants selected.
By default, Perk flags all expenses where the submitter is not included as a participant. However, you can choose to disable this warning if required.
Expense participant types
Submitters can add three types of participant to an expense:
-
Perk people: Submitters can search for different Perk people by name:
- Own company: By default, submitters can only search for Perk people from their company. These participants are displayed in black.
- Other companies in the account: You can choose to allow submitters to select Perk people from other companies in the account, if required. These participants are displayed in gray.
- External participant: a third party from another company. These participants are displayed in light beige.
Configuring expense participants
Under Settings > Account > Companies, select View spend settings. In Compliance > Participants you can restrict the type of participants that can be selected in the expense form. For example, you can choose to allow people to only select Perk people that belong to the same company as the company where the expense is being created or to allow them to select people from other companies in the account.
In addition, for external participants, you can determine the mandatory fields that submitters must provide when adding participants to an expense.
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Don‘t include submitter as participant | By default, the expense submitter is automatically selected as a participant. If you select this checkbox, submitters must manually add themselves as a participant. Otherwise, an error message is displayed. |
| Disable warning for when submitter is not an expense participant |
By default, Perk flags those expenses where the expense submitter is not included as a participant with a warning (displayed to submitters, approvers, and finance people). Select this option to hide the warning. |
| Allow participant search across all legal entities within the organization |
By default, people can only search for participants that belong to the same legal entity as them. Select this checkbox to allow the person to search for participants within their organization. Otherwise, any people within the organization that are not part of the person’s legal entity must be added as external people. |
| Mandatory fields for external participants |
When creating external participants, you can determine the information that people must provide additional when adding an external participant. First name is always required. You can choose to make these fields mandatory:
|
| Enable calendar integration for importing participants |
Allows submitters to import expense participants from a calendar event. Once enabled, users need to connect their profile to their Google account to be able to import calendar details. |
Caution: Once created, external participants can’t be edited. If changes are needed, the participant must be removed and added again. Additionally, multiple external participants must not use the same email address, as Perk uses the email as a unique identifier for participant records.
Viewing participant data
Financial reviewers and approvals can view participants included in expenses in Analytics.
For expenses, you can view the number of participants, a comma-separated list of the participant names, and participant details.
Depending on the participant type, the details available vary:
- Perk people: first name, last name, and email address
- External participants: first name, last name, email address, and company name.