To streamline your spend management, Perk displays notifications to let you know if an expense goes against a company policy or may present some error.
Notifications are displayed in real time when you enter an expense. Perk displays three types of notification in expenses:
- Info: these notifications provide additional information about the expense, e.g. Total amount exceeds CHF 400. No action is required.
- Warning: these notifications may affect your expense and may require action, e.g. Potential duplicate.
- Error: these notifications affect your expense and require action. Your expense cannot be moved to the next status until the issue has been solved, e.g. API error.
If a notification is triggered, you can either adjust the expense according to the warning, or submit the expense with the warning, which lets managers, approvers, and financial reviewers see the warning as well. All notifications are grouped together at the top of the expense form.
Warnings don’t block you from submitting an expense. Warnings can occur for two reasons:
Tip: You can add a Comment to the expense in case you had a prior discussion with a manager about an expense with a warning.
Policy-based warnings
These notifications are triggered depending on your company‘s configuration. You may or may not see these notifications when submitting your expenses. For example, if weekend expenses are allowed within your company, the weekend warning will not be triggered for expenses you have on the weekends.
Policy breach
Your company can set up an expense rule that determines the maximum or minimum spend amount of expense. If an expense goes against that policy, the expense is flagged. Additionally, you see information on the policy your expense violated.
Weekend days
If an expense is created on the weekend (i.e., the expense date falls on a weekend), the expense is flagged.
Category warning
If your company has configured any categories to automatically trigger a warning, the expense is flagged.
Allowance already claimed
If you create a duplicate per diem for the same day or have already claimed a per diem, the expense is flagged. Financial reviewers can find the duplicate by clicking on the notification in the expense.
High surcharge
If additional charges, such as tips or fees, are permitted by your company’s expense policy, then an expense may be flagged if the additional charge is beyond the permitted limit.
Paid with company card
If an expense has been paid with a company card, it may trigger a warning stating that it is non-reimbursable. This means that there is no direct reimbursement to you as an employee, but instead the amount is deducted from your company card account.
Official invoice required
If an expense exceeds the threshold for expense amounts requiring an official invoice, the expense is flagged. For example, in Switzerland, the threshold for requiring an official invoice is CHF400.
Additional finance review required
If your company has automated its expense approval flow, but an expense has triggered a warning, it triggers a manual review for financial reviewers and displays a notification.
Default cost object
If the cost object you selected in your expense doesn’t match the default cost object that you are assigned to by your Perk admin, the expense is flagged.
VAT / tax rate
If your company requires that you select the tax rate applied in expenses. If Perk is unable to extract the VAT information from the expense or you don’t select a tax rate, Perk flags the expense. This notification is shown for all expenses without VAT information.
No receipt expenses
If you create a no-receipt expense, these expenses are automatically flagged. If your company allows no receipt expenses, you may be required to attach additional documentation to justify the expense. In this case, if you try to submit an expense without additional documents, a notification is displayed.
Distance in mileage expenses
If you create a mileage expense in which Perk automatically calculates the number of miles or kilometers and then you manually change the mileage, you may see a notification that the number exceeds the threshold set by your company‘s Perk admin.
AI-based warnings
Apart from policy-based warnings, Perk may also flag an expense if it is detected as a duplicate or if the amounts in the expense were not properly extracted.
Potential duplicates
If Perk recognizes the receipt as an expense already submitted at your company, the expense is flagged. Expenses are flagged as duplicates when there is more than one expense that appears to be identical.
Perk‘s AI uses these criteria to identify duplicates (depending on your company’s configuration):
- Tax number or document hash (hash value used to identify the image or PDF)
- Total claim
- Currency
- Date
- Time
To be deemed a potential duplicate, the expense must match all the criteria selected by your company‘s Perk admin. For example, if your admin has selected Currency and Total claim in the company setup in Perk, Perk flags all expenses that have the same currency and total claim amount regardless the information of the document, i.e. creating false positives where the date of the expense may differ.
Duplicate notification depends on the role:
- Employees: can only see and access the expenses that are identical to the expenses they have previously uploaded.
- Managers and approvers: can see the IDs of all expenses that may be duplicates within their company.
- Financial reviewers: can see the IDs of all expenses that may be duplicates within their company (legal entity) and can access those expenses.
Managers and approvers may find the duplicate expense by searching for the expense ID listed in the warning, provided they have access to that expense. Financial reviewers can click on the notification to access the potential duplicate expense.
Validation
If there is an issue in validating data, Perk flags an expense. This may be caused if Perk can’t automatically extract the expense information from a receipt.
Extracted amount changed
If you manually change the total amount in an expense and the manually entered amount is greater than the AI-extracted amount by a set percentage determined by your Perk admin, Perk flags the expense with a notification that the Perk AI extracted value doesn‘t match the expense total claim.