Negative Expenses Limitation
We have recently become aware that we are no longer able to create negative expenses.
This has created a huge problems on our end with invoicing clients.
- We often have corporate card returns/refunds that, of course, come through as a negative number. If we’ve already invoiced a client by adding the original expense to a billing record, we have no way to now add a negative expense to a future billing record to reduce the next invoice for that client. And if we haven’t already invoiced the client, zero’ing out that expense creates an audit mis-alignment with our financial system.
- We also often have credits that come from suppliers related to an invoice that we’ve posted. Same as expenses, not being able to create a negative expense for supplier credits causes the same problems on this expense type.
We were not made aware that this change was coming and it is causing errors in our Fusion automations that try to create a negative expense record in Workfront, in addition to the client invoicing issues.
The response we received from support included: Recent changes to financial field validation and data types in Workfront have tightened input requirements for financial fields, especially currency fields. By default, negative values are not allowed in currency fields unless specifically configured to do so. This is likely a result of efforts to ensure financial data consistency and reduce reporting errors.
Anyone who has ever returned an item they’ve purchased knows that negative currency values are a very regular thing.