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- Expense Reporting System
- Who it's for
- Distributed teams
Distributed teams
Distributed organizations need expense work to remain understandable across departments and review queues. Expense Reporting System connects employee identities, manager scope and effective policies to the reports people submit. The shared process keeps receipt evidence, approval history and reimbursement outcomes together while each person sees only the work their role permits.
How Expense Reporting System is set up for you
The right policy for the report
Review the organization, department and role scope of expense policies, with an explicit precedence rule where policies overlap.
Clear ownership when teams change
Keep the employee directory and manager relationship current.
One payment route per claim
The approved employee payable follows the selected payroll or separate AP route.
Confirm the applicable effective date and retain the basis used by approved claims. A centrally maintained rule can explain a missing receipt or required justification, but a submitter’s explanation cannot replace an independently required exception decision or remove a blocked finding.
An inactive manager, a delegation or a changed team needs a configured routing outcome rather than self-approval. Preserve the assigned actor and report revision throughout the process. Own-report and direct-report access must apply equally to links, receipt files, searches and exports; a shared notification does not widen those permissions.
Snapshot that channel before sending the request, and do not switch an in-flight payment merely because a policy setting changes. Reconcile the earlier attempt before replacement. Pilot employees in two departments, a manager change and a duplicate payment callback; compare approved amounts with the actual confirmed outcomes.
Employee and Cardholder manage their own evidence. Manager reviews direct reports. Finance Reviewer and Controller / CFO operate the authorized cross-team queues. Admin maintains configured identities and rules.
Start with a reconciled employee and policy population. Configure the actual connectors and acceptance cases with Proto before application launch. The website describes the authored system; it does not represent an already connected runtime.
Features to start with
Roles on the team
- Admin
- Systems administrator. Owns configuration, integrations, and master data. Not the day-to-day expense submitter or approver.
- Controller / CFO
- Oversight role. Reviews high-value reports, audits policy violations trends, signs off card reconciliations, and owns the relationship with the card program and the reimbursement-channel decision (payroll add on vs separate ACH).
- Finance Reviewer
- The post-manager approver. Checks policy compliance, releases the reimbursement, owns the card transactions matching backlog, and is the primary preparer on card reconciliations.
- Manager
- Line manager with scope over direct reports only. The first approver in the chain. Sees aggregate spend for own team but cannot see another team’s reports.
- Employee
- Self-service submitter. Files own expense reports, uploads Receipts, captures Mileage, registers own Vehicles. Reads own reimbursement status. Cannot see anyone else’s data.
- Cardholder
- A Permissions attribute on Employee — set true when the Employee has at least one corporate card cardholder = self row in Status: Active. Inherits all Employee permissions plus card-specific surfaces.
Set up Expense Reporting System your way.
Start free, then use Proto to change fields, steps and approvals before your team goes live.