For certain expenses such as meals, companies 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 global 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).

Perk lets you indicate participants, select the people who were covered by the expense and specifying whether it is someone with a Perk account or a third party person. Financial reviewers with edit permissions for expenses can also add participants to the expense, if required.

By default, you are automatically selected as a participant (unless disabled by your Perk admin). Similarly, if an assistant creates an expense on your behalf, the registered submitter of the expense is added as the default participant.

Perk flags all expenses where you are not included as a participant. However, Perk admins can choose to disable this warning if required.

As the participants are selected, Perk displays an information message giving the cost breakdown per person in the expense currency:

Expense participants

You can add three types of participants to an expense:

• Perk company user: Perk person from your company. These participants have a black color.
• Perk account user: Perk person from a different company, but from the same account. These participants have a dark gray color.
• External participant: a third party from another organization. These participants have a light grey color.

No notifications are sent to external participants. The information is collected for your company‘s reporting purposes only.

Adding an employee to an expense

When creating or reviewing an expense, you specify the corresponding participants in the Participants field. You can search for other people in Perk by typing their name in the Participants field. By default, you can only search for people in your same company.

People as participants in web	People as participants in mobile

Employees in other companies in their organization must be created as external participants, unless your Perk admin has configured the feature to allow you to search for other users across the organization.

The search list shows the most recent participants, excluding those already selected.

Adding an external participant

To add external participants, click + Add external participant. Enter the first and last name of the participant, their email address, and the company name.

External participants in web	External participants in mobile

By default, you must enter at least the first name of the participant. The other fields may or may not be mandatory depending on your company‘s settings. This information is stored with the expense for reporting.

Caution: Once created, external participants cannot be edited. If changes are needed, the participant must be removed and added again.

Warning: Multiple external participants must not use the same email address, as Perk uses the email as a unique identifier for participant records.