Hi friends! We are so close on implementing a push through for Company Credit Card Expense reports from Expensify in real time (vs. end of month upload). One issue we ran into is that the category drop down is a required field to fill in. Does anyone know how to change this so that it is not mandatory and an account can be selected? I've tried going to transaction forms under customization and was only able to figure out how to add the account with a drop down. I wasn't able to figure out how to remove the mandatory part of the category field

@MaryH to my knowledge this is not possible. I'd be curious if you find out different though. The workaround is to create an expense category for each account and just give it the same naming/numbering. A little tedious, but isn't too hard with CSV import.

Can't CSV import expense categories to my knowledge? Is there something I missed?

that's not the issue...I don't mind adding those in, but our CEO wants to keep categories to a minimal for our employees who have to fill out expense reports. So I guess the only other work around for us would be to reclass the expense from an other category account 😞

this?

OMG

or we just stick to the end of month upload, but it is delaying our month end process

How would they fill out expenses without a category?

we have a generic category other that goes to an account that we change at upload time, but since we are exporting directly from Expensify to Netsuite we would have to do a manual reclass

You could have a generic category - and then push from your category to the account with a journal entry

yes, JE seems like the only way around it

Yeah that sounds a bit like allocation schedules (i.e. based on % or headcount or whatever)

the reviewer of the reports updates the memo and includes it in the details

Why cant' they have categories that fit the type of expenses?

yeah...we do allocations too 🙂

In expensify I think you can turn off categories

Or if the "reviewer" is the one who actually knows where the expenses go, could they just enter the expense reports. Just a thought.

That said - that still feels like putting an undue burden on accounting that belongs on the person putting in expenses to categorize according to rules.

no, our team is incredible and do an amazing job entering in their expenses into expensify. Accounting just reviews it in case something needs to be reclassed

I wish I had more ideas for you Mary - I'm not following your use case at all.

So your question is on the Expensify side? Each of your categories should be associated with one expense account when you set them up. Then your accounts and categories should line up 100%.

I have no issues on the Expensify side...categories are driven by Netsuite, but I will reach out to them to see if others were able to work around the category being mandatory

No worries. I would suggest using a smaller batch of accounts that they could feasibly have expenses to, instead of your entire chart of accounts

Yeah, that's typically what is done, but @MaryH your initial question made it sound like people needed to be able to choose from every possible expense account. Apologies if I misunderstood.

You guys are right...maybe I just add each account and deselect them in Expensify as needed vs adding the whole chart of accounts. If that's the case...I might be able to do that this month! 🙂