Emburse Enterprise

Rules Overview Workshop

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Invoice

Rule Best Practices

• Best Practice:
• More Rules = More to Test = More to Maintain
• Customer is responsible for maintaining the data integrity of the rules. Customer should understand the routing design and be able to update rates, roles entities, messages etc. as needed.
• Always consider end-user experience for policy compliance.
• Too many rules can create frustration, create bottlenecks and cause long processing times
• Automate, Automate, Automate

Types of Rules

• Line Item Compliance
• Compliance rules are designed to “fire” a warning or violation for a line item on an invoice if the line item does not follow the company’s specified criteria
• Example: The line item cost code or date is missing and needs input.
• Example: A Quantity or Unit Price must be specific for each expense. Either a warning or a violation can fire.
• Submit Compliance
• Submit compliance rules are designed to “fire” a warning or violation, upon submission, for an invoice taken as a whole if the invoice does not follow the company’s specified criteria
• Example: Check for non-standard characters in invoice number allowed ( /, \, -, _, periods, no commas and alphanumeric).
• Routing
• Routing rules are designed to specify who needs to approve an invoice based on criteria that the company sets.
• Routing can be based on a number of different attributes, such as an invoice requestor or an allocation. For example, an invoice can route to a department head of the invoice requestor’s department for approval

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Warning & Violations

• Line Item Compliance & Submit Compliance
• Line Item Compliance & Submit Compliance rules can trigger either warnings or violations
• Warning
• A Line Item Compliance or Submit Compliance Warning is a “soft stop”. It allows the user to type in a response and save that line item for submission.
• The Warning and user response follow the invoice all the way through the approval process, so all approvers are able to see which warning was triggered and what the user’s response was.
• Violation
• A Line Item Compliance or Submit Compliance Violation is a “hard stop”. The user must reopen the line item or invoice header, and satisfy the criteria noted in the violation text. If the user does not satisfy the criteria, they are not allowed to submit the invoice.

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Warning & Violations

Example of Warning and Violation

• Warning Message Box:

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• Violation Message Box:

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Message Best Practice

• An important component of a good end-user experience is accurate, clear and helpful messages for your compliance warnings and violations. 
• Messages are visible in approval emails
• A user new to Emburse Enterprise is likely to see more compliance warnings in the beginning as they get used to the system and first impressions count! 
• Set the tone by providing good messages up front.

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Messages Best Practice

Points to keep in mind

Are the messages accurate?

• Does the message accurately depict all conditions in the rule?  Pay special attention to any 'amount' or 'number of days' limits.
• Rules change often - make sure conditions and variables within those conditions added later, get reflected in the rule
• Are the messages readable?  �It's easier to read things that are grammatically correct than “tech speak”.  Use proper sentences in both the short and long messages and try not to abbreviate or use Emburse Enterprise terms that don't mean anything to the end-user.

Are the messages helpful? 

• No one likes to be reprimanded by a compliance policy warning or violation so try to make the message friendly and clear about what the user should do next.
• Try to avoid making it personal e.g. "you have exceeded the limit"  Abrupt or accusatory statements give a bad impression.
• Use messages as another opportunity to train.

Are the messages consistent?

• Use the same punctuation and style for all messages.

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Routing – The Basics

• Emburse Enterprise routing for Invoice is report level based. This means the entire report is routed to each approver regardless of specific routing conditions based on invoice header choices or line items
• Approvals and Returns are done for the entire invoice
• As part of best practice, we recommend ALL approvers be configured in the system, even if they will never need to submit an Invoice.
• We will review the different solutions to accomplish this based on your specific requirements. For those where our best practice model does not meet their needs, we do have an option to allow the employee and approver to select an additional approver when they submit / approve the invoice if need be.

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Best Practice Routing

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Approval Queues

• We have the ability to route to any number of approval “queues”. This is called “group routing”. Typically special “roles” are defined in the system and assigned to those employees who will be responsible for approving items in the particular queue (e.g. AP Review, T&E Audit)
• When reports are routed to a queue, anyone with the special role will be allowed to act on any form in the queue
• Individual queue approvers can setup approval filters on the queue so that they can see only those reports meeting a certain criteria
• Client might have separate roles setup for Invoice approvals (e.g. APInvReview vs APReview for more detailed handling)
• It is important to note that approval emails are NOT sent to queue approvers.

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Built in Date Integrity Checks

• If a creator submits an Invoice on behalf of an employee (Requestor), the Requestor must approve the invoice. This assures that a requestor takes responsibility for their own invoice
• If an Invoice is created via OCR and Confidence threshold <x% (set in admin), route to Role InvOCRReview
• If an Invoice is created via OCR and requestor, vendor, vendor address or amount is blank, route to Role InvOCRReview
• If new vendor or vendor address request, route to Role APInvReview
• If Invoice Total exceeds X (5000) route to Role = Controller
• *Dollar threshold vary by organization based on volume and amount of spend
• If Invoice Total exceeds X (5000) route to Role = CFO
• *Dollar threshold vary by organization based on volume and amount of spend

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Additional Routing Scenarios

• Approval levels can be accommodated such that the invoice is routed up the approval chain until approved by an approver with an appropriate approval limit
• Additional routing steps can be configured for:
• Invoices that need to have a rush payment
• eInvoices
• Overnight check
• FX Processor

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Emburse Enterprise Rule Sheets

• How To Read A Rule Sheet - Basics
• Each rule sheet, whether compliance or routing, expense or invoice, follows the same format and is split into 3 separate areas:
• Description of the Rule
• Column A is the Description of the rule. This is the plain English text explanation of what the rule is designed to do.
• Conditions of the Rule
• After Column A, there are columns that have header descriptions in Blue cells. These blue conditions are all of the conditions of the rule. If there is a grey box, it means that the condition to that rule does not apply. All of these conditions are “AND” conditions, and all must be met in order for the rule to fire.
• Action of the rule
• After the blue section, there is a green area of the spreadsheet, which is the Action section of the rule sheet. The Action section dictates what will happen when all of the conditions of the rule are met.
• For compliance and submit compliance rules, the action section will dictate whether it is a warning or a violation.
• For routing rules, the action section will dictate who the item will route to for approval if all of the conditions are met for the rule to fire.

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Emburse Enterprise Rule Sheets

Rule Description

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Thank You!

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