What is Expense Management?
Agave Expense Management turns credit card spend into coded, approved expenses in your ERP, matched up with receipts. Cardholders submit receipts through the field app, Agave matches each receipt to the bank transaction it belongs to, and your accounting team reviews the coding before the expense is pushed into your ERP. The end goal is that, by the time a statement closes, each transaction on it has a receipt attached and a home in the ERP.
This guide covers:
- What Expense Management does
- How Agave and your ERP work together
- The various stages an expense moves through, from card swipe to synced record
- Who does what, and where to go next
What Expense Management does
Expense Management is built around a bring your own card model. You keep the cards you already have, and Agave connects to the bank account(s) behind them to read transactions.
Three things happen on top of that transaction feed:
- Receipt capture. Cardholders submit receipts from the Agave field app on their phones. Receipts can also be uploaded directly through the Agave website.
- Matching. Agave pairs each receipt with the bank transaction it belongs to, so nothing has to be reconciled by hand against a statement.
- Coding and approval. Agave auto-fills the coding details, routes the expense to its designated approver, and writes the finished record into your ERP.
What if we use cards without a bank feed?
Cards that do not produce a bank feed, such as fuel cards and store cards, are still covered. Download the transactions from the card issuer as a CSV, import the file into Agave, and those transactions match to submitted receipts the same way feed transactions do.
Where your ERP sits
Your ERP is the system of record. Agave reads reference data out of it, like vendors and project information, and writes finished expenses back into it.
Agave reads from the ERP:
| Data | Used for |
|---|---|
| Projects and jobs | The project list cardholders pick from in the field app |
| Vendors | Matching the merchant on a receipt to a vendor record |
| Cost codes and cost types | Job costing on the expense |
| Ledger accounts | The GL account on the expense |
| Employees | The ERP employee on a card, where the ERP has an employee concept |
| Credit card accounts | The ERP card account, where the ERP has a native credit card concept |
How an expense flows through Agave
Who does what
Three groups of people touch an expense:
- Admins connect the bank and the ERP, assign cards to users, invite users, and configure coding profiles, policies, and approval workflows.
- Reviewers and approvers check that an expense is coded to the right job and budget line, or that it will post cleanly, then approve it or send it back.
- Submitters, usually field users, photograph and submit receipts in the app, associating receipts with jobs when applicable.
See Expense Management Users for what each group is responsible for and which guides to read.