Whether it’s for daily tolls, mileage, or if you just eat the same meal every day, if you need to enter several rows of duplicate entries, there’s a helpful – and overlooked – way to do this.

When creating your expense report, go to the Expense Grid (or Worksheet) and populate the first row.

Then, select the option to ‘Add row duplicated from selected row’ and add 1 row.

A new row is created with the same data as the first row.

Now, just repeat as needed and update the date for each row.

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Many companies have many expense items defined, but in practice certain types should only be used for internal activities. In other cases, companies will define region-specific expenses. You may be able to address this by limiting which expense items are accessible in user filter sets. But if you need to define available expense items by project, you can do this with Expense Policies.

Expense Policies are a set of features that need to be enabled by OpenAir Support. Once enabled, a new section is available on the Project Properties form for Expense Policies.

By default, nothing is changed until you limit available expense items on a project. To limit expense items per project, modify a project and select the ‘Allowed expense items’ filter. Select the items to be available on expense receipts and save the pop-up and project.

When users create expense reports, the expense item field cannot be populated until the project is selected. Based on the project selection of the receipt, the expense item field is loaded with available values.

This filter is respected on both the receipt form and the worksheet/grid view.

No expense item available until project is selected:

Have you ever found expenses entered against a project that should never have had them? If you have, you might have wished you could disable expense entry against certain projects.

To do this, you’ll need to create a custom checkbox field for Projects.

Name the field ‘avail_for_exp’ and notify OpenAir Support that you’d like this field to indicate availability in expenses.

Once they confirm, you can un-check the box to prevent expenses from being entered against any project.

Have you ever wanted a way to let your employees request authorization in advance to incur certain expenses on a project? And would you like to be able to compare the actual expense report with the authorization? With Expense Authorizations, you can.

You can enable this feature in Administration -> Application settings -> Expenses settings -> Other settings -> and select the option ‘Enable expense authorizations.’

Once it’s enabled, you will have the option to define user-level approvers for authorizations. The project-level approver is the same as the Expenses approver.

To create an Authorization, just find the Authorizations menu in the Expenses module and select ‘New…’

In the New Authorization form, add a name, description, project and date range along with any notes.

Add a list of each expected expense item along with optional notes and then submit for approval.

When creating your expense report, you have the option to associate an Authorization, if you have one approved.

When viewing the Expense Report page, you and the approver can compare the authorization against the expense report.

This feature does not prevent entering any data or determine auto-approvals or rejection, but it does provide useful information when planning expenses and comparing those approved plans against the actual expenses incurred.

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Are your expense item billing rules being capped accurately in OpenAir?

If you are adding caps to your expense item billing rules, chances are the cap isn’t being applied quite the way you expect. Normally, the system will apply the cap to the nearest hundredth, but it is based on quantity – not money.

For example, if an expense billing rule is capped at $500, and $300 has already been billed, the amount available before the cap is reached is $200.

If a receipt for $251 is processed by the billing rule next, the rule will cap it to the nearest 100th of $251, which is $200.80. In this case, the cap will actually be exceeded by $0.80. It may be a small amount, but is it worth the risk of potentially delaying invoice payment?

Instead, there is an option you can enable that will apply the cap based on price instead of quantity. This way, the cap will always be met exactly.

To enable this feature, just request the internal switch “Adjust price instead of quantity to meet expense caps in billing rules” and you’ll never have to wonder again!

Did you know you can override a user cost to accommodate project or task level differences?

There are typically two situations in which the cost associated to a user is not necessarily the same cost that is recognized for the work performed by that user on a specific project.

1. The user is a subcontractor with variable rates by job or type of activity.
2. The user is a resource from another cost center or region in which there is a standing agreement regarding cross-charge rates.

To accommodate these scenarios, OpenAir provides the ability to override the user’s cost rate on the project and/or the task level forms. When the project level cost override is enabled, a new section appears on the project properties form called: Loaded Cost Override

For each resource associated to the project, a new hourly cost may be entered. This cost is a replacement of the user’s cost for any time recorded against this project. If you have multi-currency, you may choose to set the currency association as well. The task level handles the cost override as part of the task assignment section:

Using this feature introduces a change in reporting fields for cost values related to timesheets. When the feature is not active, the only option for timesheet cost is Timesheets-All user cost, etc. When the feature is active, the reporting values double related to cost. A Timesheet-All actual user cost and a Timesheet-All current user cost value will appear in reports to provide cost information. The Actual User Cost value is pulling the override cost rate from the task level, or project level if task is blank or inactivated, or user level if no overrides have been set on the projects. The Current User Cost always pulls the cost rate from the user cost table. The Actual User Cost values provide a more accurate margin and profitability based on fluctuation of user costs.

To activate this feature, contact OpenAir support and ask for ‘Enable loaded costs for projects’, ‘Enable loaded costs for tasks’, and complement it with the ‘Enable loaded cost currency overrides in projects and tasks’ if you use multi-currency.

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