Hey everyone! Just spent the afternoon building a simple internal wiki page for my team on how to avoid the most common expense report rejections. Our finance team was getting swamped with the same fixes.
I focused on the stuff that trips us up most: missing client codes, blurry receipt photos, mixing personal and business charges on one card transaction (big no-no here!), and forgetting the 'business purpose' field in our tool (we use Expensify).
I tried to keep it super plain, no accounting jargon. Like, "Take the receipt photo on a dark, flat surface *before* you crumple it up" and "The client code isn't the project name, it's the 6-digit number from Salesforce."
Has anyone else done something like this? What were the top 2 or 3 rules that made the biggest difference for your team? Curious if I missed any major pain points! 😅
Good move. Getting ahead of the common errors saves everyone time. My team's biggest hangup was always foreign currency expenses. People would submit the USD amount their card showed, not the actual local charge, which screwed up our reconciliation.
The other one that bites us is not splitting multi-day trips correctly per our policy. If a hotel stay straddles two calendar months, it needs to be split into two expense line items for proper allocation. One line gets rejected every time.
You might add a note about receipt retention periods, especially for audit-heavy clients. "Super plain" is right, but finance will still need the hard copies for seven years.
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