How You Create Expense from Email Receipts

When you're on a business trip, you may want to keep filing your expenses as you incur them. Oracle Fusion Expenses provides you with the convenience of creating expenses on the go without accessing the Expenses web application.

If your company chooses to provide you this flexibility, your administrator gives you an email address to which you can forward the receipts of your expenses. You can mail the receipts as an attachment or as an inline content of your email. For example, if you take a taxi to visit your business client, you may get the receipt for the travel as an email. To create this expense, you forward the email to the email address provided by your administrator.

After the application receives your email, it authenticates if the email is sent by an authorized user. The application verifies if the email address from which the receipt is received exists as a valid work email address in Oracle HCM Cloud. For example, you may have separate work and personal email addresses. If you forward an email receipt using your personal email, the application doesn't verify you as an authentic user. This is because it can verify you using only your work email address that's in the application.

Here are some other details that the application verifies before it processes the email receipts:

• The user is an active employee.

• The user has the required privileges.

• The associated business unit is enabled for electronic receipt processing.

After authenticating the user, the application extracts details, such as merchant, date, amount, currency, location, and so on from the email receipt. Then, it creates an expense item using these details. Based on the details in your receipt, the application is also able to assign an expense type to the expense item.

Next, the application matches the expense to the appropriate corporate card charges. Your application administrator can also configure tolerance values for matching different kinds of expenses. In such a case, the application considers these configurations while matching the expenses to the corporate card charges. Here are the different field that can be matched in this process:

• Expense date

• Amount

• Currency

• Merchant

• Expense type

• Expense category

If the email receipt expense exactly matches a corporate card charge, the expense is automatically submitted in an expense report, including other expense items that are queued for auto submission. If there's a potential match, you need to confirm the match in the Expenses web application to proceed.

After the matching process, the information in the email receipt and the corporate card charge are merged and updated in the expense. This involves identifying whether to use the information in the email receipt or the corporate card charge for the expense. Here's the criteria for merging of the information

• Expense amount from the corporate card charge is used for the expense.

• Merchant name from the corporate card charge is used for the expense unless it's null.

• Expense type from the email receipt is used for the expense unless it's the default type.

• Expense justification and attachment from the email receipt is used for the expense.

The application also checks if an expense is created more than once from different sources. It matches these fields to identify a duplicate expense:

• Amount

• Date

• Currency

• Merchant

If all these fields in the expenses from different sources match, the application marks them as duplicate expenses.

Notifications

When the Expenses application processes your email receipts, it sends you different types of notifications. The original email you sent for creating the expense is attached to the notification. This helps you map the notification to the different email receipts you sent.

Here are the different notifications that you can receive:

Type of notification	When you receive the notification	When you do next
Can't process receipt	The application couldn't process the emailed receipt.	Contact the administrator for your application privileges.
	The business unit isn't setup to create expenses from electronic receipts.	Use the Expenses application to create the expense.
Can't create your expense	The expenses couldn't be created because of an unexpected validation error.	Use the Expenses application to create the expenses.
Your expense was created	The application created the expense using the details in the emailed receipt.	Review the expense details in the notification and use the Expenses web application to make changes if required.
Matched expense	The application matched a corporate card charge to the expense.	Review the expense details in the notification. If needed, you can break the suggested match using the Expenses web application.
Possible matched expense	The application found a potential matching corporate card charge for the expense.	Use the Expenses web application to review the details. You can confirm the suggested match.
Duplicate expense	The application finds that a similar expense was already created. Therefore, it doesn't create the expense.	Use the Expenses application to create the expense if needed.
Incomplete expense	The application couldn't fine the required information to create an expense.	Check whether you sent a receipt with your email. Then, use the Expenses web application to complete your expense.