Expense Reports Features and Preferences
An administrator can enable the Expense Reports feature at Setup > Company > Enable Features, on the Employees subtab. When enabled, NetSuite automatically creates an Other Current Asset type account for advances paid and a non-posting account for unapproved expense reports.
The Approval Routing feature lets you set up an approval hierarchy required to process expense reports, time transactions, and purchase requests. After an employee enters an expense report or purchase request, additional processing of the transaction depends on the employee's expense limit or purchase limit. It also depends on the employee's designated supervisor or approver, and their approval limit.
If something changes in the approval hierarchy, any expense reports that aren’t approved yet are reset and have to start the approval process over. For example, if an employee gets a new supervisor, any open expense reports lose their approvals and are rerouted through the new approval chain.
If this feature isn't enabled, each expense report or purchase request is automatically routed to the employee's immediate supervisor and then to accounting. For more information, see Approval Routing.
To set preferences for entering expenses, go to Setup > Accounting > Accounting Preferences, and click the Time & Expenses subtab. For more information, see Time & Expenses Accounting Preferences.
Expense reports show the date entered, report number, employee, date range of all expenses included in the record, and the purpose of each expense. You’ll also see expense category, date of the expense, amount for each item, any advances, and the total. There’s a summary box in the top corner for totals, and both the employee and approver signature and date. You can customize expense reports to include more fields. For more information, see Report Customization.
If you use NetSuite OneWorld, the Intercompany Time and Expense feature and the Intercompany Expenses preference affect whether users can enter expenses for customers with subsidiaries other than their own. If the feature isn’t enabled or the preference is set to Disallow, users can only select customers with the same subsidiary to which they are assigned. If it’s set to Allow, users can enter intercompany expenses for any subsidiary. If it's set to Allow and Adjust, you can generate automatic adjustments for intercompany expenses. For more information, see Enabling Intercompany Time and Expenses.
You can select a default payable account for expense reports at Setup > Accounting > Accounting Preferences. For OneWorld accounts, you must set a default payable account on your subsidiary records. For more information, see Set Subsidiary Preferences.