Allowances are specific monetary amounts applied to a user, under one or more expense categories. The Allowances feature lets administrators assign Allowances to a user for a custom date range. Using Allowances helps to automatically prevent out-of-policy employee reimbursements, going a step further than policy violations to prevent report submissions including excessive spend.
If an expense is over the Allowance limit, users may not be able to submit the excessive spend, depending on the company’s preferences.
This article shows you, a Certify Administrator, how to create and manage your company’s Allowances.
Creating an Allowance
1. On your Certify homepage, click the gear icon.
2. On the Configuration page, select View and Edit Allowances
3. To create a new allowance, click Add Allowance.
4. Fill in the following fields:
- Allowance Name: Select a specific name for the allowance, which represents what the allowance is for.
- Allowance Code: Enter an (optional) internal code.
- User Name: Choose the user to which this allowance applies.
Please Note: To create the same allowance for multiple users, use the Bulk Upload Option.
- Start Date/ End Date: The date range determines which expenses apply to the allowance. If an expense’s date falls within the date range of the allowance, it counts towards that allowance.
- Allowance Amount: Enter the amount a user can spend within the established time frame and expense categories.
- Prevent Report Submission: Selecting this option prevents a user from submitting future expenses until an allowance expires, if a user exceeds their allowance.
- Participating Categories: Select one or multiple categories depending on business requirements. The categories selected determine if an expense applies to an allowance.
4. Set the allowance to Active and click Save.
Please Note: Allowances should remain active even after the allowance end date, in the event a user attempts to submit an old expense. Allowances should only be deactivated/deleted if the allowance is no longer applicable or otherwise will not need to be tracked.
Allowance Tracker
Once an administrator creates an allowance, assigned users will see that allowance on any Draft or Pending expense report containing participating expenses. Additionally, an Allowance Tracker appears if the expense report date range overlaps with an active allowance date range.
The Allowance Tracker gives the end user a real-time look at how they are tracking toward their budgets, and helps the user plan their future spend by providing the following information:
- Name: The name of the allowance.
- Start/ End Date: The date range of the allowance.
- Allowance Amount: The total amount of the allowance.
- Draft: The allowance amount currently in Draft status.
- Pending: The allowance amount currently in a Pending status.
- Processed: The allowance amount which has been Processed.
- Remaining: The remaining allowance amount.
If a user attempts to submit a report exceeding an allowance set to Prevent Report Submission, a message appears and blocks the user from submitting the report.
Approving Reports with Allowances
Approvers see the same Allowance Tracker as submitters when approving expenses as part of an allowance. This allows approvers to make better approval decisions, as well as gives them insight into how their users are tracking toward budgets
Reporting
Accountant-level users have access to an Allowances Report, found under the Reporting tab. This report gives the accountant a company-wide view of all allowances and the current progress of each.
The report contains each allowance’s total amount, the current amount by status (Draft, Pending, or Processed), as well as a Variance. This helps accountants quickly identify over-budget allowances.
Individual users will also have access to a personalized version of this report, called My Allowances, which gives them a bird’s eye view of only the allowances assigned to them.