Name: ERP & Expense Management Integration Master Class
Uploaded: 2025-04-17T18:20:05.619Z
Duration: 1 h 20 min
Description: ERP & Expense Management Integration Master Class

Transcript for "ERP & Expense Management Integration Master Class": Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for our great event, ERP and expense management integration master class. My name is Dasha Skripchenko. I'm the manager of field marketing for North America here at Emburse and your host for today's event. I saw a lot of repeat names on the registration list, so thank you so much for continuing to put your trust in us to deliver valuable content. I do have a few housekeeping items before we get to that good content. So first, this event is being recorded. You will receive the link to the recording following the event. I want to point out the engagement area on your right. We have a q and a tab, which we encourage you to ask questions in. We also include a bunch of helpful resources for you in the documents tab. We also have chat available today. Feel free to engage with us, your fellow webinar attendees. Tell us where you're joining from or what else you would like to learn about in the future. If you do have some audio video issues, there is a light mode on the bottom. It's a button so you can click it. This will let the video process a little bit more before showing to you. It might make it a little bit harder to submit poll questions, so you can always let me know in the chat if you're having difficulty doing poll questions because poll questions are required for your CP credit, which is my next slide. I know a lot of people are excited. We brought our CP credit sessions back this year. Anybody who's attending today is eligible to or eligible to earn one CP credit. To, to earn the credit, you have to attend the entire webinar, and you do have to participate in all three poll questions. And then you can expect the first to follow-up post event, with your certificate within seven business days. So I want to introduce our speakers today. We have Jeremy So to and Tory Dennis. Jeremy brings over twenty years of expertise in implementing and supporting expense management systems for organizations of all sizes. With a strong technical and business processes background, he navigates the complexities of expense management and travel policy, providing thought leadership and strategic guidance. And we also have Tori. Tori is the driving force behind Ambers' ERP gateway. She has transformed workflows across business units, enabling rapid integrations that generated immediate impact. And for all of that work, she also won the award of 2024 Emburser of the Year. So, again, congratulations, Tory, on that award. I'll always keep bringing it up because I think it's awesome. For the audience, I really hope you came prepared with some questions because you are in the right place to get all of your integration questions answered. I had the privilege of working alongside Jeremy and Tory at NetSuite SweetWorld last year, and I know that you are in fantastic hands. So make sure I get those questions ready for the q and a section. Alright. Before we start, we're gonna obviously talk about why integration matters, but we are gonna start with a poll question number one. So you should see, there's a tab on the right that will appear for poll, and I'm also sharing on the screen. All you really have to do is just click on the answer that there's no submit button. Just click and we'll see the results. But the question is, what is your biggest integration challenge today? Is it synchronizing user data? Is it reconciling expenses? Is it reimbursement data, master vendor records? And if it's other, let us know in the chat because, you know, these are just some. I'm sure there's a lot more. And if you let us know what those other ones, I'm sure Tory and Jeremy will be able to incorporate that and help you solve some of those challenges today. Jeremy and Tory, anything coming in so far you see that is kinda resonating what you're seeing out there when you work with customers? Yeah. I, I do. I I see the the reference to synchronizing data and the reconcile of expenses. Expense reports oftentimes are not just reconciling the car charges, but paying back the users. And so, the reimbursement data, very good option. Other, I'll get into that as well. So it's it's good, that I'm seeing a spread across categories. I'm not seeing that must happening in master vendor records. That tends to tie more towards AP like vendor and invoice processes. So that might be, why that's the case, and and maybe we've got a stronger expense orientation on this call. Great. Well, I will leave the poll question open, but I'll stop sharing. So if you, haven't had a chance to, fill that out yet, you can go to the poll tab and, provide our, you know, for our tracking, we do need to have all your three answers for the CPE credits. And now we're gonna go to this slide, and, Tory, take it away. Yeah. I think this is a great follow-up from that poll question. What we've included here is a case study from a customer whose finance team went, to implement integrations using our expense solution and was able to transform how they worked. So this might resonate with quite a peep a few people on the call is if you're starting from a manual Excel based, process, integrating your ERP can really save time. It can make your whole workflow far more efficient. And what you'll find is in the doc section, we've included a few case studies that we'll touch upon within the webinar about how different teams have been able to, implement solutions to reconcile expenses faster, sync user data, and really touch upon the things that, make integrations valuable for all of our customers. Very good. So, you know, to kinda tie into that, the the poll question started with different types of data primarily. And so for the first part of our discussion today, I'll dig a little bit into the those different data types, what they mean for you all, how they might be represented in a solution as well as, what they mean back on the ERP side, so the benefits to you. And then as we continue with the webinar, Tory's gonna go into a little more on the, technology side as well as process side, like how we actually make that happen, how you might be able to do the same. So starting with the data types, there's a couple of main ones. I'll refer to those as kind of the people data users in the system. The other one is around the accounting objects themselves, your chart of accounts, your GLs, and things of that nature, projects. And then the last one would be the financial objects. And so this one is a little more vague, and so I'll, give you some examples of that as well. But but these would be, things that are important kind of for your overall process, things like maybe receipt images. So first up, let's talk about users in the system. So, if you are already managing users through an HRIS system, and there's several of them out there, or if you're doing that within your ERP, you already have a place that I would call the system of record to manage that set of users. And so you don't necessarily want to have to maintain that in two different or multiple different systems. So in most of these technologies today, including ours, right, you would be able to integrate and sync with those HR and ERP systems and their benefits and, you know, pros and cons into kinda where you get the data. But the the key thing here is you want a unique individual in your organization, to be represented by a unique, object or a user profile within the expense system. Here's an example of how that could be manifested. Right? So, it can help with log on. So some of our customers are using single sign on to add some security around the authentication piece. So in addition to user ID and password, today, in order to preserve the security of systems, You'll often hear about multifactor authentication, which is f MFA. There's a bunch of different technologies that will tie all that together. And so making sure that you've got unique user IDs with email addresses and names that match. Right? All that, you wanna be able to carry over automatically. Moving forward a little bit, that ties into the approvers piece of it. Right? So approvers are users as well, but, typically, they have an extra role in your overall process. In this case, maybe they're reviewing expense reports for the individuals that they manage directly. So this might be a line item or a a line level manager, for example. So approvers in the system, can sometimes be associated with that user's profile. So if I, for example, was a am a user in the system, perhaps Tory is my manager, Tory might show up in my user profile as a manager. All that data exists in your system of record somewhere. And so instead of having to manage that within your different tools using your HRIS system or the ERP, whatever you decided is kinda hold that to sync over that user attribute along with their manager, can be super helpful so that you're not having to have different processes to keep that all in sync. That can also be helpful because sometimes managers change or people leave the organization. Right? And so you wanna make sure that the system is being updated with that, on a regular basis. And we'll cover a little more detail, when Tory gets into some of the technologies available in terms of timing. Like, how quickly do you want that to replicate? How much detail do you need to come across? Right? Next up, I'll talk a little bit about attendees. Now attendees can have a different term depending on how you have implemented that or using it in your processes. In our system here, I'll show you an example of what I would call attendee. This could be somebody that is at a meal. Right? So let's say I've orchestrated a business meal, and I have internal attendees. So these are people that maybe work with me. And then I have external attendees. These might be guests that I'm entertaining that aren't part of my organization. By tying in that user data that we talked about syncing from your HR system, it becomes easier to capture this level of data on expenses, as they come through the system. I I can easily search for other people in my organization, and then I've now got a unique record. So, I've got Tory here. I've got Dasha here. Dasha's got an awesome last name, but it can be prone to mistyping, I dare say. Tory, goes by Tory, but she also goes by Victoria, if you look at x number of our HR records. So, because we all know different people with maybe some of those different nuances, what this allows you to do is have that unique user record tied to it. So whenever I look for Tory, I'm a % guaranteed that I'm gonna have Tory in the system just like everybody else in the organization is gonna have Tory in here. And by tying her to an internal record, it lets you automate some of your processes and policies that might be tied to how much am I gonna spend on a meal example, for example, if I'm entertaining someone versus an internal event. Very good. Moving forward and and past the idea of data types around people, let's talk a little bit about chart of accounts, default call centers, and and projects as relate to accounting objects. K. So, relating to chart of accounts, and and I'll let Tory maybe add a little bit of a flavor to this as well, to kinda chime in on how she's seen this effect, or play out with different ERPs. But, when we think of chart of accounts, often we're thinking about your GLs. Right? So an expense type might have a GL. But then we're also thinking about all the subsequent coding that goes along with that, perhaps departments, cost centers, and things of that nature. Yeah. For this chart of accounts, often what you'll you'll see is an impact on your GLs, or on your accounts, and you'll see something that's also a little bit more user facing, like an expense type and expense category, something that your team can engage with that may make a little bit more sense rather than seeing the GL numbers themselves. It allows you to apply policies for expense types, but the chart of account, how it impacts your financials is all mapped behind the scenes to make sure that it's hitting the books correctly. Excellent. So so moving on, chart of accounts is the most clear, right, representation of getting data synced between, your tools, your expense tools, invoice tools, and your system record, which would be the ERP in this case. Right? Because we wanna make sure that when users are selecting expense types and they map to GLs, that's a one to one mapping with what exists in your ERP. The same thing with other values like departments and projects and and, those items. You don't want, to have to do a mapping later. You don't wanna have to correct things that don't exist, combinations that aren't valid. Right? So the more that we can sync up in that system of engagement, which would, be more on our end of things, the the cleaner the integration back to your system record, ultimately saving you time on the back end for processing. And then carrying forward, you'll see another example here, just an example of output from one of our systems, where we're able to give you a report kinda showing you totals and summaries. There's couple different pieces of this. Right? There's a human component, but then there's also the back office ERP component of it. You need codes and values, that tally up for your reporting when it comes end of month and a quarter you're trying to run reporting and close books. These values need to sync up there. Moving forward a little bit, I'll talk about default cost centers. And so, I'm using the cost center term here, as a generic value. I know that certain ERPs, have an object called a cost center, and that's totally valid. But but the way I'm referring you to here might just refer to, what some people call cost center, some people call department, maybe it's an office, maybe it's location. Those things can be used to define where an individual's expenses might go. So if I'm a part of a group, so for example, I'm in the sales group. Right? So when I submit expense reports, they should roll up into the sales department. And so when you submit an expense report as a sales user, you want that to automatically happen. Right? You don't want my expenses accidentally going to, the implementation services team or to the product team. And so default cost centers is how you manage that within solutions. That's another attribute that can come across. It can often be tied to that user's profile. It can be synced as part of a user record in many cases, and that allows you, to kinda streamline and reduce errors in the overall process. So here's an example of one of our systems, just to kinda highlight that. You can tie all the the financial information you need for posting, things like a GL, things like the date so you know the posting period, the amount of spend there so you can find the the financial impact. But, also, the other attributes here, you want to kinda fall into place. What department are they in in this example? What cost centers are we hitting? And then tying it a little bit forward as well, there can be other processes associated with this, like projects. Certain organizations refer to them as client matters. The idea would be, you have certain charges that have an impact, a cost to your organization, and you have other charges that get routed to more of a billable scenario where you can recover some of that cost, from one of your own customers. We wanna make sure that that's clearly enabled upfront and that we're tying to those values here, and those should all be synced, on a regular basis as well, to make sure that it stays current. And that's kinda where I'll dig into a little bit more on this projects and billable external internal thought. Right? So here's another example from a configuration perspective. When it comes to projects, you'll see here that, there's usually a a name that the users are familiar with. Right? So maybe it's my customer name. But then sometimes there's a unique project code, and sometimes your users will know the project code and sometimes they won't. Right? So, when configuring systems like this, you wanna make sure that you're using the attributes that make sense to the end users. When they go into the system to apply expenses that are billable and non billable, they need to be able to find their project easily, and this allows you to do it. Now depending on the the tool you're using on the engagement side, there's gonna be other attributes associated with projects that you might be able to leverage. Right? So for example, some of our customers are using our enterprise solution. And in that solution, in addition to things like unique codes and names for a project, we can also tie in a date, and a date might be a project close date. So if you're running projects, you understand that, hey. There's a period of time when a project is open, and you don't want expenses to be submitted against that project outside of the open and close dates. So you can use our systems to do something like this. And, in general, expense and invoice projects or products have different ways to incorporate some of these attributes associated with projects. Right? So just, you know, one thing I wanna highlight here, it's not just the coding or the naming description, but it's those other attributes that you need to consider when you're looking at the integration. It's, do I have project opening close dates? Do I have a remaining budget that I need to kinda correspond to? Are there financial approvers tied to this project that I wanna automatically include into the workflow? So earlier on, I had hit on the idea that, yeah, approvers in the system are users that you sync over. But those same approvers aren't just linked up through an organizational hierarchy. It's not just line managers that approve things. In many cases, your processes might dictate that you have regional ownership or you have project level ownership, and you wanna make sure that those users of the system are flagged as approvers. And this is one way that we see where you would tie projects to those types of approvers. Very good. Excellent. So moving forward to the next type of data types, and these are the finance projects themselves. These are the things that people are spending. These are supporting documentation that goes along with, an expense process, potentially an invoice process. And so here, I'll start with corporate card transactions. Alright. So corporate card transactions are usually coming from a corporate card directly. Right? So most tools are gonna allow you to get the data straight from the bank or the issuer and collect that and assign directly to a user. So depending on your card program, if you've got a, what I'll call, a typical corporate card relationship, you have somebody running around with plastic potentially. And whenever they spend on that plastic, all the you want all those expenses to come back to them, and you're reconciling them regularly with a month end close probably so that you don't pay the user the card and then hope that they pay the issuer or the bank. Right? So if I've got a corporate card that's an American Express, for example, you probably wanna pay it for me directly. You don't wanna give me the money and then hope that I pay the American Express card. So this system is gonna allow you to do that. Right? And it's gonna allow you to do that because we can go directly to the cards. We would be able to assign that type of transaction so you know it's a credit card transaction versus something that's submitted, out of pocket. And you can tie it directly to the cardholder so they can put them on expense reports. And then in your process, you wanna make sure that when those expenses are submitted, you've tagged it as such because your ERP is potentially gonna flag these things differently. Now I know Tory's gonna potentially get into this as well later on, the idea of how you post into your ERP. So this is just something to keep in mind. Right? Credit card transactions are generally treated a little bit differently than out of pocket transactions, and it has to do with the way you record it, but also the way you pay it. Right? And so, from the end user perspective, you wanna make it clear to them as well. Stepping forward a little bit, receipts. So receipts are fairly common. We have some organizations that wanna receive for everything. We have others that are more no nuanced policy. Right? So the policy can be, hey. Credit card transactions under a certain amount don't need a receipt, for example. Anything over a certain amount does. You know, if you've got a meal, it always needs to be a itemized receipt. Like, those are all details that you might apply in your policy as it relates to the receipts that you require when expenses are run through the system. There are different ways that receipts can be submitted into a tool. Snapping a picture from a mobile device is super common, forwarding through email. In many cases, there's the technology available to integrate directly with vendors so that when the vendors incur an expense, those can be passed directly to the expense system. Some common examples might be Uber and Lyft. Right? You you book a trip, that's a business Uber, then that can go directly to your expense account. So when you submit an expense report for it, that receipt will already be waiting for you along with any tip amount that you might have provided. So different tools will show that to users in different ways, and they'll have supporting technology. In this case, I'm showing you an example of how things might be collected in a receipt gallery. These are examples of out of pocket, maybe, transactions where the user has emailed a receipt or taken a picture from their mobile device. There's additional technology that can be used throughout the process as well that might take that receipt and merge it to a primary financial transaction like a credit card. So best case scenario, they use their credit card, they submit a receipt, or we've received the receipt directly, and those things get merged together so that when it's applied in expense report, you have all the supporting documentation along with the primary financial one, which comes directly from the bank, all together for you for review and and approval. When receipts come in, there's also additional technology that can add detail. So, for example, with the latest advancements in in AI that that we're seeing, you can go beyond just capturing things like dates and amounts and the vendor and the type of expenses. Going forward, you'll be able to understand more. Hotel bills can be itemized, so you can actually see room rates and taxes. Did they have parking and movies? If you look at meal expenses, you can start to infer a little bit more about, hey. Is there alcohol on this? Like, what is the tip amount? Are they following policy? How many meals are there? From a fraud and compliance perspective, you can start to look at what people are actually buying. They went to China, and maybe your team doesn't speak the language. Other tools can help translate that for you. So you now understand what it is you're buying in other countries where you may not have, the ability to read it, natively. So all of that can be incorporated into your overall process. And then on the back end, you may be using those receipts not just for your own audit purposes, but also for billing purposes. Right? You might be if you think about those projects that are billable and non billable or client matters, you might be taking these receipts and passing them on as a that addendum, to your customers, for, the bills they receive from you, right, for for project work. So you wanna make sure that whatever's coming into the system can be pushed out as well, and that's all, available through integrations as well. K. Stepping forward, travel data has a little more nuance. And so I'll give you a quick example, and I'll just kinda leave it open that there there's a lot of different providers out there. And, there's technology associated with the booking tool or the buying process. They're often called OBTs or online booking tools. These are the actual interface where you might go in and shop for a flight or a hotel. On the back end, usually, they're fulfilled by a travel management company. So if you go directly to an airline, for example, American Airlines or something like that, they will sell you a ticket and they will book it. But if you go through maybe your corporate provider, you might be using an online booking tool, and then usually there's a travel management company on back end that's fulfilling it for you. They're doing the shopping and clearing all the inventory, making sure it's valid and billed. Systems allow you to get travel data, which is more detailed than you might get on the invoice. Right? So the invoice you receive on that purchase might say that it was American Airlines, and this is the date, this is the amount. These are some some locations and things. And all of it is just visual representation on the receipt image. Travel data, however, is able to be pulled in and it's identified and and logged such that you can get to things like policy exceptions that happened at the time of booking, you know, project codes that you might have used when you booked. All that stuff can be applied here as well. So, I'll just find finish this part up by saying that travel data is a component of this. In certain cases, you want to be able to leverage that, on the back end for analytics. From an ERP integration perspective, there are places where it can be useful. But, in most cases, you would be referring to the financial transaction, first and then supplementing it with additional data from from this travel piece. Encumbrance is the next piece I'll talk about. This is a process oriented piece. Right? So, many customers, especially in higher ed, they will have a process kinda like a purchase order. It's the preapproval, of an expense report. And in many cases, that preapproval is more important than the expense report because they need to be able to pay for this. It's a commitment, but they don't always have the funds just floating around. Right? So what they wanna do is make sure that they encumber or lock up those funds in advance so that when an expense war comes in, they have the money to pay for it. So this typically starts with a preapproval. The preapproval can go through different stages of approval. You can route it to different people. You can allocate the charges, you know, to the appropriate cost centers and departments and things of that nature. And then after approved, it can go through different stages of use. You can expire it when maybe it's sufficiently old or fully use it if somebody's completely used that budget. You can leave it in a partial new status. So sometimes, I might have a preapproval for a conference. And I buy the airfare first, and I wanna get reimbursed, and so I do that today. Well, the conference maybe isn't for another three or four weeks. So that preapproval, the encumbrance there might have tied up the full amount, and then you need to use up pieces of it. Right? So when we talk about the integration back to the ERP, a lot of this can be automated based on the existence of that preapproval in the process, as well as completed expense reports that tie back to it. And then accruals. So accruals, I'll give you a visual here, as many people might be running accruals today from a spreadsheet perspective. Accruals is similar to that encumbrance, but it's, you know, a different process. As you know, accrual would be a spend that's not, you know, fully reconciled. It's kind of outstanding. These might be expense reports in progress but not fully approved. Some customers will consider credit card transactions that are unreconciled in there. Some people will consider cash, you know, out of pocket transactions, along with the credit card. So whatever process you've determined for accrual, from a finance perspective, it's a super common process. And what ultimately happens on the ERP side, you would need to determine, hey. Do you need detail? Do you need summary? At what point do you need it? And then is this something that you just kind of accrue and then you you roll back, beginning of the the next month? There are a lot of tools available for that. Some of them can take data exports and syncs back into your system. Some of them might be more visual, using analytics or spreadsheets to get to that data. But, accrual is certainly an important part, of the puzzle, at month end, quarter end, etcetera, when you wanna get to, closing your your books. So with that, I'll, take a pause, and and we'll talk a little bit more about the details of how this actually gets done. K. Jeremy, thanks so much for walking us through the, most commonly integrated data points that we see for our our ERP integrations to our expense management tools. I'm gonna turn over the conversation to the actual act of integrating. So I'm gonna put on my implementation consultant project manager hat, and I'm gonna recall, projects that I have worked on, over the years. So for context, I have overseen the, successful onboarding of over 1,500 customers with integrations. So that is ranging from SMB customers, perhaps with simple accounting needs, enterprise customers with perhaps more, complex bespoke, integrations, accounting firms that we've worked with to standardize their integration strategies. And I'm just gonna pull out a a bit of the, best practice tips or the things that I've seen that commonly will indicate a successful integration between systems. So why are customers, integrating, and what are some things that make a successful integration project? I wanna call out you have to measure what matters. And so, understanding what data accuracy, what problems you may have now with your data, will allow you to set some goals in terms of where you would like to be in the future. We also wanna make sure that you're, tracking how many hours currently is your team held up in, perhaps more manual efforts. That way you can track efficiency that happens throughout this. Compliance and audit audit readiness. Are you seeing a lot of expenses that are coming through without the right, rule enforcement or perhaps using the wrong type of data so that you can successfully, post it in your financial systems? And then lastly, faster month end close process. And don't even get me started on, fiscal year end. Integrating your ERP and your expense management tools, really will help to, move things in a far more efficient and far more scalable, direction for your team. With that, customer testimonials. Customers who have seen how their finance teams have really got return on investment and how they have, streamlined their processes by using accounting systems tied to their expense, management system. So we have customers in the SMB space and customers, in the mid market and the enterprise space who who really can speak to the benefits that they've seen, by implementing processes that connect their, expense management and their ERP into a single ecosystem. Alright. So getting started. A bit of a a practical guide. Firstly, it's choosing the type of integration. So there there's quite a few ways to choose this, and you have to choose what is right for your organization and right for your business needs. We've called out three. There's more types of integrations definitely, but three in order to bring all of your ERP data tied with your expense management solution. So we have connectors. Those are generally native, sinks. They are supported and built, by the vendor, and they they tend to lead towards a best practice. By that, I mean, Jeremy did a wonderful job of showing some of those best practice data points. Now generally with an in house connector, the mapping and and some of the behavior between your system and those data points have already been considered and are predefined. What that does mean as a limitation is that there can be, less room for flexibility or customization when you use a out of the box connector. The second type, flat file. So a flat file, there's generally less, effort upfront in order to connect systems because, let's say, you have a legacy integration or a legacy ERP that does not have, APIs available, the ability to download all of your data, put it into your expense management tool, and then export a CSV, either to an SFTP or to download and upload. You're integrating that information, but it is more of a flat file process, and there is some human intervention in there. These are generally a little, there's a little more air room for error here because there is a manual process, and it is not quite real time. And then finally, rest APIs. So this offers the most in terms of customization. You can really build an integration between your ERP or and your expense management tool based on your individual needs. You have a lot of flexibility. You do need a lot of resourcing available, development resourcing, IT resourcing, within your team in order to support these. So just a bit of a a heads up there in terms of effort for those types of integrations. So the key here is really aligning what your organization needs, the systems that you're using, what type of information that you need to pick the right, way of connecting your system. Alright. So let's talk about, frequency needs. So with the different types of integrations, something to consider is how often do you need your ERP and your expense management tool, connected and talking to each other. You can have reactive frequency. So reactive types in which you are, perhaps, batching and export through a, flat file. And that might be great for teams that run, those types of imports or those types of reconciliation on a monthly basis. So you would run an export. You have a schedule for it. And, when there are changes in your ERP that you need reflected back into your expense management tool, you run an export and you make updates at that point. There's also the active type of frequency in which there's actually a a set schedule. So you can determine for your organization whether that's something that you would like daily. So throughout the day, perhaps you have new projects that are coming in for your team. You have new users. Your organization is growing, quite rapidly and that you have a lot of movement on the HR side, and you need your expense management system to have that reflected at the end of the day so that all of these, users can submit the expenses that are appropriate for them. So that's where a scheduled sync, daily, weekly, monthly, whatever frequency you need to determine what, what makes the most sense. And it can be that certain pieces or certain elements, are necessary to update more often than others. You may have, chart of accounts, a user list that stays pretty stagnant. There's not much movement there, but you have expenses submitted frequently. And at the end of the day, you want them in your system. So you can also look at different, scheduling there. And then there's proactive. So there's real time or near real time integrations. Let's say you have credit card, expenses. Users are coming in, and they are submitting and letting you know, very frequently about, the charges that that have been incurred. You can have integrations where every time something is fully approved, it's passed an accounting check-in your expense tool. You have that sent over directly to your ERP, really depending on, you know, your your own needs as an organization. Okay. So this second poll question is almost like a trivia question. So let me share it. So it's open now, and I see people already been answering it. What frequency is commonly used for data integrations? I will let Tory comment, but this was really almost like a trivia to make sure everyone's paying attention because I don't think there is such thing as the right or wrong answer. Right, Tori? There's not a right or wrong answer. It really depends on your organization and depends on your needs. One of the the most common, frequencies that I see is actually on a, a daily basis. So that's generally for inbound information. I see where where customers are looking to, update their content pretty pretty free frequently, and, the export may be on a even more frequent basis close to real time. Perfect. Alright. I'm gonna try to move us forward here on identifying, key stakeholders. So this is a very important part of any integration project. It is making sure you are bringing the right, team members, right, departments into your integration needs. Integrations are really cross functional in that, you'll need to ensure that many members have a say, because there are a lot of rules in terms of setting up your integration successfully and maintaining them in a way that's going to suit your organization. So like I mentioned, some organ some, types of integrations require a little bit more, from different roles. So critical roles in the integration, IT. IT needs to, be involved, needs to be engaged. This can really help you define what type of integration, you're going to be embarking on. This will let you know resourcing wise if a a full API integration is the best path forward or if, using an in house connector, something that's more native and out of the box, is going to support you, for long term in terms of maintenance and the onboarding effort required. Finance, that goes without saying. We need to understand, how your ERP works. There needs to be an understanding. Are you doing journal entries? Are you doing expense reports? Are you doing vendor bills? All of that comes into play and defines a lot of the implementation of how you're gonna use your expense management tool to support your accounting needs. And let's not forget our approvers. There needs to be in the implementation process, a voice to the approvers, the people who will be using your expense management tool, making sure they're seeing the information that they need, in order to, fully approve and validate an expense, and that it has the type of information that they need to understand if the budget is still, is still being protected and the type of expenses appropriate for the department And our super users. So this really speaks more to, your rollout strategy for an expense management tool, making sure that you have users who are comfortable using, your expense product and that they can provide a little bit feedback if what you have designed, is perhaps a little finance or accounting heavy and a little less user friendly. So you really wanna make sure you engage those stakeholders throughout the process. So I just opened our third poll question. And before Tory talks a little bit more about what this, journey really looks like, we wanna know where are you currently in your integration journey. Alright. Looks like, responses are coming in. I see that some people are fully integrated. Maybe we should invite you to be a speaker on our webinar as well to share your experience and or if you don't mind, share some of your experiences in the chat to see if any of this has been resonating of as far as how your journey went. Looks like a lot of people are exploring options, so you're right in the right place. I'm going to keep, the poll question open, and we're just gonna go back to the slides, to finish out our presentation. See, I think we were right about right here. Thanks, Tasha. And, yeah, so it sounds as though several people in the audience here have gone through this full onboarding journey, and there's, it sounds like a a healthy dose of, of participants here in the webinar who are about to embark on it or exploring their options. So, you know, we talked about finding or choosing the right integration type. So there is a bit of the evaluation process there. The kickoff, which is defining your requirements, and we have a few slides coming up here about defining the right type of information for your integration, and then the implementation. So the actual onboarding, ensuring all the teams who need to be engaged in not just the design, but also of, the testing are involved in that process, and then the go live. So that's the ongoing support of your integration, and some of the tools that you'll need in order to make sure that you can successfully get through this journey. K. So let's talk about designing the user experience. Alright. Firstly, this is where IT and finance play a really big role. This is really critical to determine what your, what your team needs to have as integrated and connected, for your organization. Now on one of our first poll questions, we talked about what type of data, is most important to you, or do you find, that you would like to improve upon, when integrating with your expense management, system? And no surprise there. Users was a big a big, big response there. So making sure you've defined what it is in your user list or any data point that needs to be updated frequently. Perhaps it's the creation of new users and who their managers are improve or approvers are, what type of, departments they have access to. Those are all things that you can bring over in, a feed, whether it is a, a flat file feed that you upload into your expense management system, from your HR system or your ERP, whether you're using an API or whether you're using a native connector, keeping your user list up to date is is a critical piece here, ensuring that you have the right employees or vendors to have access to submit expenses. Mapping. So what, a field in your ERP might not be called the same thing in your expense management tool. So what you have to think about critically is the information that you need, between your expense tool and your ERP and ensure that you actually have a label for it if it is shown to users that they can engage with. So what I've, shown here is the idea that you may have a card program. So let's say you have an Amex feed, a Mastercard, a Visa, and you have that information being used, and, expense submissions are coming in on that Mastercard. What exactly does that Mastercard need to export back as, in your ERP? Do you have a specific account that those charges, and all those transactions need to hit? Perhaps you have custom fields or or native dimensions, and they're called subsidiaries, they're called, classes in your ERP, is that the the field name that is going to resonate with your employees? So making sure that anything that's necessary is mapped appropriately. So behind the scenes in the back end, you're getting exactly what you need. And in the front end of an expense, management system, your, your team is able to engage with it so you can successfully capture the data. Alright? For, frequency, we talked a little bit about the types, and ensure that you have a way to set that frequency that's going to best suit your organization is important. So the idea of having on demand, so I want to import now and export now is really important in case you need to change things. Let's say, immediately, there's a new project that's opened up, you realize you need to have expenses or a billable invoice that goes out. At the end of the day, you might need to export now rather than waiting for your schedule. But the idea of defining the frequency and having a standard approach is really important so that your teams know when those expenses are going to be, posted into your ERP. K. Monitor and maintain. So you're set you've set up your ERP integration. That's awesome. That's perfect. Congratulations. You've gone live. You need to ensure, though, that you are keeping an eye out on when things are successful or things have changed. Now when you have two systems that talk to each other, sometimes they can get out of sync. No matter the frequency which you're syncing things, sometimes, you may have information that won't post successfully. Let's say Dasha just submitted her expense report from our trip in fall. Perhaps you've closed the books on that. There could be an error or something that you need to monitor so that you can make a change so things can post successfully, whether it's, changing the date of that expense report or the posting period, you need to make sure that you have a way to monitor so that you can maintain these integrations successfully. Alright. And then the final, word of advice here that I have is please determine what's actionable versus reportable, making sure that what an employee or your submitters, interact with makes sense. That's the biggest piece. Those super users, will give you a lot of feedback. I hope during onboarding, but this is part of a change management strategy. You wanna make sure that this is something scalable, usable, and that things that are, values that are required for your, expense report and never change are, perhaps programmed. They are hard coded behind the scenes, and users don't need to engage with them. So there's there's a lot to consider to make this successful, but I think we've given you a lot of tips to help you get there. Yeah. And with that, we are at time. I think we actually did a really good job answering all of the questions as they were coming in. So thank you so much to everyone who's engaged with us. The conversation does not need to stop here. Please connect with us. I'm gonna post a quick post event survey. Thank you so much, Jeremy and Tori, for your incredible presentation, and thank you so much to everyone for attending today's event. And I hope everyone has a great day. Thank you.