Setting up Expenses

Welcome email and set your password

As an Admin for your organisation, you should receive a welcome email from Cintra People. Depending on your permissions, you will be granted to Expenses, Payroll, and/or possibly HR. When you click the link in the email, you will be required to set your password.

Navigate around Expenses

Once logged in, you will be presented with the user dashboard. You are now ready to set up your system.

While you can add your users directly into the Expenses module (see Creating and editing Expenses users and Importing and exporting Expenses users), their records will NOT be synced with Payroll.

Therefore, unless you wish to have standalone Expenses users, you should first create their record in the HR module. This is then synced over to the Payroll module, then automatically synced to Expenses. See Add new members.

Once your employees are added, you can assign them appropriate user types, e.g. administrator, finance, or auditor.

For more information on the various user types, see User types.

Company settings

As an administrator, you should record all known information in the following areas of company settings:

• Company details

• Financial settings

• Mileage and distance information

• Export and accounting details, which will depend on which finance system you are using

• System behaviour: various other checkboxes you can turn on/off, depending on your requirements.

Setting up an approval flow gives structure to how expenses are approved within your organisation. Consider questions such as:

• Should the line manager always approve expenses?

• Should approval depend on the value of the expense?

• Do you require a multi stage approval process?

Create your approval workflows

Each approval flow can have multiple stages, approvers, and rules. You might need several different approval flows to meet your organisation’s requirements.

Assign workflows to users

As with adding users, you can assign workflows either manually (for smaller workflows) or using a template.

Categories are used to classify expenses, mileage, and timesheets, helping your organisation track and report on spending by type. Capture Expense includes a set of default categories to get you started, which you can add to or customise to suit your needs.

• You can create categories manually.

• Or import them using a template.

You can create VAT records & map VAT codes to your accounting system.

• If you only need to add a few VAT records, you can Creating and editing VAT records.

• For lots of VAT records, you will be quicker to import them using the template.

Tags are a flexible way to classify users and expense categories. After defining the tag type (such as department, location, or cost centre), you can add values to it to represent the specific groups or codes your business uses.

These are used for accounting and reporting purposes, and also to restrict access to expense categories.

• First you must create the tag, then assign values to it.

• If you need to add a lot of tags, it is quicker to import their details.

Vehicle records let you assign fuel rates to employees and keep track of mileage logs. You can set up and use your own mileage rates or the HMRC approved rates - which are automatically kept up to date every quarter. Expenses can accommodate company cars, car allowance, private vehicles as well as carbon tracking.

• Expenses already has a list of preset vehicles and their HMRC approved rates (for both private and company vehicles) which you can add to or edit as required.  

• You can either set your own rate or use the HMRC approved rates.

• View this article for more information on all the vehicle and mileage related fields.

There are four different ways you can import credit card transactions into Expenses. To do these:

1. Importing bank statements through CSV.

2. Using the Open Banking integration.

3. SFTP feed directly from your bank.

4. Using Pliant cards.

• To allocate credit cards to users, see assigning credit cards to users. This article also explains how you can allocate credit cards by using the import / export user feature.  

• To allocate vehicles to users, see Assigning vehicles to users. Again, you can also assign vehicles to users using the import / export user feature or assign users to vehicles using the import / export vehicle feature.

Other areas of Expenses you may wish to set up prior to go live include:

Integrations

Expenses integrates with a wide variety of third party banking and accountancy applications, Cintra People Payroll, and more. To view all available integrations and to find out more, see Introduction to integrations.

Subsistence rates

Subsistence rates define the amounts users can claim for meals, accommodation, and other allowances based on how long they are away. See Set up subsistence rates and categories.

Advances

This feature works like petty cash. Navigate to Advances on the left hand menu, click the +Advance button on the right hand side.