Before you get started
For “Restaurants and guests” expenses, it is possible to invite both internal and external employees. Internal guests are not expected to submit a meal on the day they are invited.
Cleemy Expenses will generate an alert for these cross-over invitations.
How it works
A cross-over invitation alert is triggered when a user attends two meals of the same type (breakfast, lunch or dinner) on the same day, either by being invited or by submitting the expense themselves.
Let's look at an example: Chloé and Marie ate at a restaurant together as part of a client meeting. Marie paid for the meal and therefore created a "Lunch" expense in Cleemy Expenses, where she also indicated that she had invited Chloé.
On the same day, Chloé also creates a "Lunch" expense.
If both Marie and Chloé submit these expenses in two expense reports, their approvers will see the following messages:
- Chloe's approver, looking at Chloe's expense: "Cross-over invitation: Marie has already entered a Lunch expense, but has not submitted this expense in an expense report."
- Marie's approver, looking at Marie's expense: "Chloé has entered a Lunch expense mentioning Marie as a guest, but she has not yet submitted this expense in an expense report."
Please be aware that if an employee submits two lunches on the same day, no cross-over invitation alert will appear. In fact, in this case it is a duplicate. You can activate the duplicate detection feature in the Cleemy Expenses settings.
Setting up cross-over invitations
To apply cross-over invitation controls to a type of expense, go to "Settings" > "Types of expenses" and select the type of expense in question.
Once you have selected the type of expense ("Restaurants and guests"), you need to specify the invitation category (lunch, dinner, etc.).
This category is important because when an expense is created, Cleemy Expenses will check whether other expenses have been submitted for the same category on the same day for any of the employees that attended this meal.
If you do not want cross-over invitation controls to apply to your "Restaurants and guests" expense, choose the "Other invitation" invitation category.
The following steps for setting up this type of expense remain the same. You may find our help sheet on how to set up a "Restaurants and guests" expense type useful.
Visible alerts
When you create a new "Restaurants and guests" expense with a guest, if an expense with this same guest already exists on the same day, an alert will be displayed. Depending on the expense already created, you may see two different messages.
- If the pre-existing expense has already been submitted in an expense report: "Cross-over invitation: XXXX is already mentioned as a participant of expense type XXXXX. The expense no. is XXXXX on expense report XXXXXX, submitted by XXXXXX."
- Otherwise: "Cross-over invitation: XXXX has entered a XXXX expense mentioning XXXX as a guest, but has not submitted this expense in an expense report."