Audience:  Admins


Purpose

Amex GBT's spend platform allows you to manage spend via 3 main steps : Purchasing, Justifying and Approving.



Overview


Purchase


Purchasing incorporates the following functions:

  1. Budgets: Use this feature to request an open budget for a total amount for any business purpose. This flexible solution allows you to request an amount, choose the team members who will call off against the budget and set any accounting coding (such as cost centre, client etc) that should be inherited when tagging real spend to an approved budget.
  2. Amazon Business: Use this feature to create an Amazon Business shopping cart and submit back to the platform for full approval. See this guide here for more information.
  3. Travel: Access the Neo Online Booking Tool to book travel, backed by American Express Global Business Travel. Access rich content and special rates. See these guides here for more information.


Justify

Justify is where spend becomes real. Click Spend on the menu to access this module. 


Justify is where spend becomes real. Click Spend on the navigation menu to access this module. Here transactions are created by users or automatically:

Create a Personal Expense: Here you can create an out of pocket expense, or process any expense not paid for on a corporate card program linked to the platform. If you have spent your own money and are asking to be reimbursed you can do this by selecting the “Create a new transaction” button at the top right hand side of the Spend view, for these costs you will also need to complete:

  • Date – when did the expense take place?
  • Merchant  – the supplier / merchant of the goods or services
  • Amount – how much did you spend?  Include the appropriate currency and rate from the drop down list box

Automatic import from Corporate Card: When you use a payment type which is linked to the platform, such as a Corporate Card, the transactions will automatically show which require the users attention. You will be presented with a list of company pay expenses that you need to justify and submit.  This is easily completed by selecting on the appropriate transaction line and completing the missing mandatory information (highlighted) then select submit the top button on each line.  


Complex actions can be preformed such as distributing an expense across various departments, assigning multiple expenses to an image, or splitting an expense across different purchase types (itemization).  For most expenses, a user must either complete or validate (if the auto-logic was unable to complete it for you) the following fields for an expense:

  • Evidence  – associate suitable evidence of the expense such as an invoice, receipt or indicate that you have a paper copy or have lost it
  • Purpose – Why was the expense incurred?  Complete a short general description
  • Select an Expense Category– What was it that you purchased?  This drives the correct tax treatment and financial coding behing the scenes.
  • Complete Financial Coding Information – Each transaction needs to be allocated to a valid set of financial codes established by your company, some codes will be defaulted and some you will need to complete based on who should be allocated the charge and or what type of products / services you purchased.

Note: if you add a receipt to a transaction, the platform will perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to try and complete as many of the fields above as possible. Basically, we read the receipt for the date, amount, merchant, currency, country and amount. Add the receipt first and just fill in any gaps!

See the guide here for more information on working with transactions.


Approve

If you are responsible for a team of people or if you are an owner of a department / project, you will be asked to approve purchases and spend within the platform.  The approval process is very easy.  The only thing to remember is to look for action indicators (counter) under the “Authorize” menu option. 



Here you can access both pre-approvals and post spend approvals waiting for you to action.  For each expense you can:

  • Review the details including receipt, and financial allocations and tax
  • Approve them
  • Query them, asking the User a question
  • If you wish to reject a transaction, you must query the expense and indicate the reason why, and is it good to provide instructions to the claimant to further justify or delete the expense.


Finance users may also need to provide a final audit/review to transactions, based on your company's chosen configuration. Finance users should look out for any action indicators under the Authorize module and the Review section of the workflow.


See the guide here for a guide on Spend Management for Managers / Supervisors


That is it, the basics are covered!




Next Steps: See this guide for more details on spend management by end users.