Managing expense & travel policies for your organization

Expense management can sometimes feel like a puzzle, especially when it comes to different kinds of expenses, rules, and who needs to approve them. Expense and travel policies are thus critical in enforcing a process and making it clear to everyone about how expense claims and travel requests needs to be handled. 

In this article, we'll show you how to create expense and travel policies in Keka. By creating clear policies for the various employee segments and assigning it to the relevant employees, you can make expense management across your organization a smoother process. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Adding Expense Policy
• Updating Existing Policies
• Assigning Expense Policy to Employees

Adding Expense Policy

To create an Expense Policy, click on Org(1) from the left navigation menu. Click on Expenses & Travel(2) under this tab you find an option for Policies & Settings(3). The first tab that you will find is the Expense & Travel Policies(4) click on it to create an expense policy for your organisation.

Click on Add Expense Policy to create a new policy. Now you will be redirected to the Create New Expense Policy Screen.

Creating a new policy requires the following details,

1. Name of the Policy: Provide a unique name of the Expense Policy. 
2. Short Description: Give a short description of your policy to expand on it if required. 
3. Base Currency: Select a suitable currency option from the drop-down, in which employees can claim their expenses.
4. Payout Mode Approval: This role is responsible for approving the payment mode that the employee has requested in their expense claim. Employees handling this can't be added to the approval chain and vice versa.
5. Claiming Future Date Expenses: Enabling this option would allow employees to request a future-dated expense.
6. Approval Chain: You can set an approval chain for claiming an expense. You can setup multiple levels of approvals on the portal for any expense claim. Keka also provides you the option of creating a different level of approval chain if the amount exceeds a certain limit or based on different expense categories. These approval chains have to be given based on the role in Keka or individuals. Also, if you are defining a person as payout mode of approved expense he cannot be added in any level of approval chain.

To understand more about approval chain click on this link : Configuring approval chain at expense category level

Once the expense policy details are filled, click Create Expense Policy to create and save your new policy.

Updating Existing Policies

To modify an existing policy, select a policy from the list displayed on the left side of the screen. Once you've chosen a policy, you can access all the configured expense categories within that policy.

If you wish to delete or edit an existing policy, you can do so by clicking on the three dots on the screen's right-hand side. 

Additionally, you also have the flexibility to adjust the timeframe for submitting receipts related to cash advances. You can modify the number of days within which receipts for cash advances must be submitted.

Within this screen, you can add new expense categories by clicking on Add Expense. To update rules of the existing categories click on the Update Rules hyperlink and make the necessary changes.

To understand more about Expense Categories click on this link: 

Assigning Expense Policy to Employees

In Keka you can assign an expense policy to employees in two ways,

Assigning the expense policy individually

To assign an expense policy individually to employees, search for the employee's name in the global search bar

In the employee's profile navigate to the Job tab and scroll down to find the option of Expense Policy. Click on the Pencil Icon that appears adjacent to the Expense Policy to assign a New Expense Policy or to Change an Existing Policy.

Now you will find an Update Expense Policy tab on your screen. Make the necessary changes, add notes and click on Update to assign the new expense policy.

Bulk assign expense policies

To understand the bulk assignment of Expense Policy, click on this link: How to Bulk Assign Expense Policy to the Employees

Hope this article was helpful. Have more queries? Contact our Product Experts right away!