Policy Settings

Under Policy Settings, you can configure the policy currency, assign a policy admin, upload travel policy, configure surcharge on foreign currency expenses, and set trip options preferences.

Here’s how you can configure Policy Settings:

Go to Settings on the left sidebar.
(OR)
Click Settings in the top right corner of the page.
Click Policies under Setup & Configuration.
Click + New Policy.
The following are the options available under Policy Settings:

Provide a Name and Description For the Policy

Enter a name for your policy in the Name Field. The name given in this field will be visible in this page and used for internal purposes only.

The Display Name is the name by which a policy will be visible to all the employees in your organization. If you don’t want the policy name to be visible to all employees or if you want to track the policy with another name, you can provide another name under Display Name.

In the Description field, you can add a description of the policy along with the designations and employee roles to which this policy can be associated.

Configure Policy Currency

Policy currency allows you to reimburse an employee in the currency configured in their associated policy. If you configure the policy currency and associate that policy with an employee, they can create reports only in that policy currency. You can then reimburse the employees in the same currency, with which they had created the report.

Let’s understand this better with an example:

John owns ABC Private Limited, a product-based company in the United States. The company has its branches spread throughout various countries, with India being one among them. The base currency of the organization created by John is, USD. If John wants to reimburse the business expenses of the employees in India, he can create a policy, configure the policy currency as INR and associate it to the corresponding employees. Once this is done, the employees in India can create reports with INR only, after which John will be able to reimburse them in INR.

To configure policy currency, select a currency from the Currency dropdown under Policy Settings and click Save.

Warning: You cannot change the policy currency in the default policy.

Allow Uncategorized Expenses to Be Part of Reports

Few expenses may be uncategorized, as the receipts or the corporate card transactions that were fetched into Zoho Spend do not have merchant or expense category details. However, if you enable this option, you can include these expenses in the reports. If you disable this option, employees will not be able to add these expenses to a report until they manually associate a catagory to these expenses.

Upload Travel Policy

Apart from the expense rules and limits, companies will have a travel policy with rules on corporate card usage, list of allowable expenses, time frame on submission, approval, and reimbursements of expenses, and so on. You can upload the soft copy of this travel policy for easy reference.

Your employees will be able to download the travel policy from My Settings in their portal by hovering over the associated policies. Ensure that the file size is less than 7MB.

You can upload the travel policy in any one of the following formats:

PNG
JPG/JPEG
PDF
DOC/DOCX

To upload the travel policy:

Click + Upload Travel Policy.
Select a file from your computer and click Open. Your travel policy will be uploaded. If you would like to remove the uploaded file, click the Trash icon under Travel Policy. The uploaded file will be removed and you will be able to upload a new file.
Click Save.

Configure Surcharge on Foreign Currency Expenses

Surcharge is an amount that organizations give to their employees for the additional fee charged while exchanging a foreign currency.

To understand this better, let us take a look at an example.

Bailey Miles, an employee from the USA goes on a business trip to Canada. Her employer, John, has configured a surcharge of 5% to be applied when an employee records an expense in any currency other than the base currency. John gives her cash advance in USD. When she converts the cash advance from USD to CAD, the currency exchange charges the exchange fee and gives her the remaining amount. Later, when she records the expenses incurred in CAD, a surcharge of 5% will be added to the expenses automatically to compensate for the exchange fee charged while exchanging the currency.

Employers can set up a surcharge percentage to be applied to expenses when employees incur expenses in foreign currencies. To set a surcharge percentage:

Go to Surcharge on foreign currency expenses section and enable this option.
Enter the surcharge percentage for the expenses incurred in foreign currencies.
If your organization is integrated with Zoho Books, you can select a category from the Processing Account dropdown to track the surcharge amount. Note that the surcharge amount will not be tracked under the category of the expense for which the surcharge is applied.
Click Save.