Expense Reports: Streamlined Approval and Creation in NetSuite 

Expense reporting is the process of recording, classifying, and documenting your organization's expenditures. Creating expense reports can help you track spending over time and categorize your company's expenses for tax filing, auditing, and budgeting purposes. Employees might submit Expense reports to get reimbursed for items such as business meals with clients or airfare to attend an industry conference. The business can use expense reports to track how much it's spending on travel and entertainment. 

An administrator on the platform has to first enable the expense reporting feature on the NetSuite platform for employees to be able to create them. 

An admin can do this by going to the employee’s sub-tab and following this path: 

Setup > Company > Enable Features.  

Once expense reporting has been enabled on the platform, the employee who wants to create an expense report must also be a part of the system with their role given as ‘Employee Center.’ 

Once an individual has access to the system with the ‘Employee Center’ role, they can do the following: 

• Create their own expense reports on the platform.  

• Edit and view their expense reports as long as they have not submitted it. 

• View their approved expense reports. 

• And also approve expense reports of their juniors if they happen to be a part of senior management. 

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Steps to creating expense reports in NetSuite: 

To create expense reports in NetSuite directly from the homepage of your NetSuite dashboard, you must be assigned the ‘Employee Center’ based role. 

If you do not have that, then you can still generate expense reports of yours or another employee in NetSuite by selecting the ‘Transactions’ dropdown, then selecting the ‘Employees’ dropdown, and then selecting ‘Enter Expense Reports.’ 

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Reference Number - This is automatically generated and follows a sequential order for each consecutive expense. You can edit this if you want. 

Date - This section should include the date the expense was made on. 

Category - Select the category this particular expense falls under from the list available. 

Currency - If the expense was made in a different currency than what your company deals in, select it from the list. 

Foreign Amount - Based on the selected currency, enter the amount that was spent on this expense. 

Exchange Rate - The currency conversion rate must be entered in this column. 

Amount (in company default currency) - This section will automatically populate a value based on the currency, exchange rate, and the amount you put in the previous sections. 

Memo/Note - This is a text field that allows you to add any notes or information related to the specific expense you want to give your supervisor or approver for better clarity. 

Department - Select the department under which you operate. 

Location - Select the location where the expense was made in. 

Client - If the expense made was for a particular client that the company can bill back to, later on, select that client from the available list. 

Billable - If the expense made is one that is billable to the client selected, then you must check this box. 

Attach File - This section lets you attach documents such as pictures of receipts so that approvers or the accounting team can easily verify and reconcile an expense. 

Non-Reimbursable - If this particular expense cannot be reimbursed, then select this box. 

Once you add the above details for a line item, you can add another expense in the same report by clicking on the ‘Add’ button and submit it. 

Approving Expense report: 

Approval workflows are custom features that a company can set up and create as per their hierarchy within the organization. 

It allows management to handle and keep track of expenses easily. It also allows the accounting team to deal with expenses in a much more systematic manner. 

An important thing to note is that this feature is not automatically enabled. So, in cases where approval workflows have not been set up, the expense reports that employees submit are directly sent to their supervisors on the platform. 

If the approval workflows have been created, then the report goes to the relevant supervisors and approvers. 

Once you create an expense report in NetSuite it stays in an unapproved expense account. Only when you submit the report, it will move forward for approvals to the assigned approvers. 

After someone from the accounting team approves the expense report claims, the amount will be reflected in the company books.    

Mastering expense reports is not only about filling out forms; it’s about maintaining financial transparency, ensuring compliance, and optimizing spending. 

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