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: This flexible solution serves two purposes:
    • Request a standard budget - Assign a budget amount and timeframe, choose the team members who are allowed to tag expenses against the budget and define accounting coding (such as cost centre, client etc) that should be inherited when tagging real spend to that approved budget. See this article for more information.
    • Request a funding budget - Specific to accounts utilizing the virtual Card feature. These budgets allow your team to fund and manage the assigned virtual Card of each user. See this article for more information. 
  2. Amazon Business: Use this feature to create an Amazon Business shopping cart and submit back to the platform for full approval. See this article 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 articles 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 created via credit card feed:

Create a Personal Expense: Here you can create an out of pocket expense, or process any expenses linked to a corporate card feed. If you have spent your own money, and are asking to be reimbursed, you can do this by selecting the Create transaction button at the top right hand side of the Spend view. To create the transaction, you will need to complete the transaction and accounting details. See more information in this article. 


Tip: Create a transaction from a receipt to automatically populate transaction details like date, merchant, amount and location.


Automatic import from Corporate Card: When you use a payment type which is linked to the platform, such as a Corporate or Virtual Card, the transactions that require user attention will automatically populate. You will be presented with a list of company pay expenses that you need to justify and submit. This is easily completed by selecting the appropriate transaction line and completing the missing mandatory information (highlighted) then select Submit. See more information in this article.




As necessary, 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.

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

Approve 

Once an expense is justified and submitted, it is ready to be approved. If you are responsible for a team, and assigned as a supervisor within the platform, you will be asked to approve purchases and spend within the platform. 



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, and you are ready to manage employee spend. 



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