Our team is excited to launch the release of our new Expenses upgrade!
When it comes to doing work for clients, whether large projects or quick tickets, expenses are often involved. With the Accelo Expenses, you get two big benefits over stand-alone expense trackers:
This upgrade makes the expense logging process faster and easier for users, provides more settings for managers, and better control for accounting particularly - as we'll now record the tax paid on an expense.
With this upgrade streamline the workflow for users. Your team can now quickly log their expenses from the Create menu in the top navigation, with the ability to search across projects, tickets and retainers to link the expense to the right client work.
There's also a new "Add Another" feature which speeds up the process of recording multiple similar expenses by remembering the values you just submitted.
Most significantly, it's the customization we've brought to expense types which allows you to perfect the workflow of creating a variety of expenses, ensuring less friction. It gives managers more control of expense types and ensures users make fewer errors as they enter expenses, helping them find it easier to do their work.
Until this upgrade arrived, recording the type of expense (e.g. Mileage) was rudimentary in that it was just a label. We heard your requests and feedback for more flexibility in this area! Now, selecting the type of expense ensures the rest of the form will adapt to show all the important data points for that type of expense. This adaptation is completely configurable in the admin area of Accelo.
So, for example, if your Food & Entertainment expenses should always be considered as Non-billable, those details can be hidden away to simplify the creation experience. Or if your Mileage expense should always refer to Miles rather than Units, that can be set too!
Expense Type Editing
We understand that expenses can come in all shapes and sizes - some have a standard cost rate, some include tax, some need to be linked to a vendor and always be reimbursed, while others are billable and have mark-up applied. All of these settings - and more - can now be controlled in the expense type configuration. To highlight a couple of the new options:
For those handling purchasing and billing, Accelo imports and synchronizes your products & materials automatically - but now those product/material items can be linked up to each of your expense types, meaning each expense can have an underlying product item too. Beside helping with standard cost and sale rates, this linking automates the inclusion of tax codes, account codes and even tracking categories (for Xero users) when creating a purchase or invoice with expenses.
We've also introduced a "Vendor" field for expenses where you'd like to note the business which you paid (or will pay) for the expense. In the future, this will help automate the creation of purchases by pulling in all expenses associated with a certain vendor.
This upgrade is now available for all customers using the Expenses - which is available for Premium-tier Accelo Products. For our Mobile App users, check back soon! Expenses can still be submitted from the Mobile App but a lot of the new functionality isn't available just yet.
To get the most out of the upgrade, be sure to configure your new expense types and consider linking them with some product/material items to fast-track the invoicing or purchasing of expenses.
