Enhance the Standard Expensify Connector to NetSuite with Tax Automation

Background

One of our customers recently asked us to connect Expensify, the world’s leading application for expense management, receipt scanning, and business travel with NetSuite. We decided to deploy the standard and free Expensify to NetSuite Connector.

Nevertheless, we rapidly realized that integrating seamlessly Expensify and NetSuite when it comes to taxes was a challenge.  

This article will explain how we managed to create a customization on top of the standard connector in order to treat VAT scenarios correctly.

Functionality

As you may know Expensify is used by all employees within an organization, and it is always a struggle to ask your employees to fill out a correct tax regime for the expenses that they are filling in.

Therefore, we have decided to create a custom field and attach all lines of every expense report in Expensify with a custom tag called “vendor region” with 3 choices available: domestic, EU for Europe or RoW for Rest of World.

Concerning tax regimes of expense reports, this vendor region parameter combined with the legal entity (subsidiary) and expense category is sufficient to assign the proper tax code in NetSuite.

Looking now at what happens in NetSuite: NetSuite identifies the subsidiary, the expense category and the vendor region (mapped as a custom field in the Expensify connector configuration). Thanks to this and the matrix displayed below, which is stored as a custom record, it identifies the tax code to match with each expense line.

As the gross amount in Expensify includes taxes and is filled out by the employee, NetSuite adjusts the amount and tax amount fields based on the tax code selected from the matrix, via a custom user event script that runs on a before record submit straight after that the expense report is synced from Expensify to NetSuite via the Standard Connector.

Conclusion

This custom-made development has been designed in order to avoid asking your employees tax regimes on Expense reports while avoiding errors for tax treatment.

This allows your finance and accounting team to trust expense reports pushed from Expensify to NetSuite and make sure they do not need to manually undertake a corrective action in NetSuite.

This article shows how NetSuite allows you to automate business processes by reducing expense reports processing time and avoiding manual errors at the same time, especially around such an important topic as tax treatment.

In short

• Easy encoding for your staff members
• Usage of SuiteScript on top of the standard Expensify to NetSuite connector
• Complete automation without any manual error

A question? You would like to implement this solution?