Background information
For "Restaurants and invitations" type of expenses, you can add internal or external guests. Internal co-workers are not supposed to declare catering expenses on the day they were invited for lunch or dinner.
For such cases, Cleemy Expenses will raise an alert on cross invitations.
How does it work?
A cross invitation alert is triggered when a user attends two similar meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner) on the same day, either by being a guest or by declaring the expense.
Example : Jane and Mary had lunch at the restaurant for a meeting with a client. As Mary paid for the meal, she created the expense “lunch - with guests” expense in Cleemy Expenses, and added Jane as her guest.
Jane also created a “lunch” expense for the same day.
If both Mary and Jane add these expenses to their expense reports, their approvers will see the following message:
- Jane's approver, regarding her expense: "Cross Invitation: Mary has already entered a “Lunch” expense but has not submitted the expense report”.
- Mary’s approver, regarding her expense: “Jane entered a “Lunch” expense mentioning Mary as her guest but has yet to submit the expense report”.
Warning: if a co-worker enters two lunches on the same day, no cross invitation alarm will be triggered. This case is an expense duplicate, which can be detected by activating an alert in Cleemy Expenses > Settings > Parameters.
Configuring cross invitations
To apply the cross invitation alert on an expense nature, go to Settings" > "Natures" and select the nature.
Once you have selected the nature (“Restaurants and invitations”), please choose the invitation category (lunch, dinner, etc.).
This category is crucial: when an expense is created, Cleemy Expenses will check if similar expenses have been created by co-workers who were invited to this meal on the same day.
If you do not want to apply cross invitation alerts on the ”Restaurants and invitations” nature, please choose the “Other invitation” category.
The next steps for the nature setup remain the same. To find out more, feel free to check out our help article on “Restaurant and Guest” Expenses.
Visible Alerts
If you create a new “Restaurants and invitations” expense with an guest, an alert will be displayed if another expense with the same guests, for the same meal and on the same day already exists. Depending on the expense you have already created, two messages can show up:
- If an existing expense has already been declared in an expense report: “Cross Invitation: XXXX is already mentioned among the attendees of a XXXXX expense nature: expense n°XXXXX from the expense report XXXXXX from XXXXXX.”
- If not: “Cross Invitation: XXXX has already entered a XXXX expense nature mentioning XXXX as an attendee, but has yet to submit the expense report.”