Creating an Expense Report Custom Form

[Emily_Austin]

We've had a request from our Accounts Payable team to set up a Request Queue for users to submit their monthly Travel and Expense Reports through Workfront so the AP team has all submissions in a single area. The current form is an Excel based form where users can fill out travel information (mileage, dates of trip, hotel, meals, transportation costs, etc) or they can fill out 'generic' expense requests (cell phone, internet, office supplies, etc). The form then totals up all of the numbers and assigns a General Ledger account based on the type of expense specified. 

I'm wondering if anyone has had any success building out a similar form in Workfront to track expense requests? My other option is to have them keep their current Excel sheet and have users attach that document to a Request that way the AP team is still able to track incoming requests and mark them complete once they've been input into our ERP system. 

[VictoriaLinn · Accepted solution]

Hi @Emily_Austin - I've done similar in Workfront, but I think the only word of caution with it is that each request can only equate to one expense line item (row in Excel). Reason being, it will then allow you to mimic Excel for reporting purposes / have the lines broken out. Might seem obvious, ha, but I've always had the experience in implementing something like this where the teams say "can I submit all of my expenses on one request" (where it would normally be multiple lines in the Excel they had prior). Hope that helps!

[Emily_Austin]

Hi!

Thanks for the feedback - I think this may be the thing that sways the team to keep the form Excel based and have them submit the entire form in WF for review. Right now they're able to track up a month's worth of expenses in one form and I don't see our users being happy switching to a new request for each individual expense. 

[Heather_Kulbacki]

If you don't have Fusion, this is likely the best way to go. We have Fusion, so we've build a form where users can enter multiple lines (ours currently allows up to 12 items per submission), then the request goes through an approval process and once it's all approved Fusion creates separate Expense records for each item on the request.

You could also have Fusion create separate issues if that's your preferred route.