To add new staff members to your RIPA Expenses account, follow the steps below.
1. Navigate to Administration --> Users
Click on Add new user.
2. Add New User form
Fill in the contact details fields and tick the relevant role boxes that you want to be assigned to this user. A user can be assigned one or more of several roles which govern what they can or cannot do within RIPA Expenses. The roles are:
An Expenses User is someone who spends/creates expenses. If your configuration and subscription tier support it, there is a related Mileage User who is someone who creates expenses specifically related to company vehicle travel.
An Authorising Manager can view and edit, and authorise their assigned team’s expenses.
An Account Manager can set up and manage the company’s RIPA Expenses account including the company’s expense organisation structure, expense authorisation hierarchy, GL codes, manage and add users, and bank feeds (if applicable).
A Reporting role is read-only, letting users see collections of expenses claims in your organisation, in order to create various reports about those claims.
The Admin sits above all the other roles and has full permissions to make changes to all parts of your company’s RIPA account. As many (well-trusted!) users as you like can be assigned this role, which can also be removed from a user at any time – but there must always be at least one admin left somewhere in your collection of users.
Some boxes, when ticked, show additional information underneath which let you set up things related to just that role. In the example below, the "Expensing user" role is selected and quite a lot of other options are visible below. If you've already worked through earlier steps in this "day one" guide, you will probably be familiar with some or all of these already (the message you see below about needing an administrator is shown as a warning for account managers). Some sections need you to first save the created user, then you can fill in details. For example, you might need to map the new user's RIPA profile to an accounting software Supplier Contact (see later).
3. Specify Payment Method
If the new user only claims reimbursement for out of pocket expenses (they spend their own own money and are then repaid), leave the Has corporate card box unticked. If the new user has a corporate card they use to incur business expenses, tick the Has corporate card box.
If using a subscription tier that supports reconciliation of card spend transactions with your bank, you will be able to select whichever corporate card from the bank's list of cards here too. Then, once the user is added, you can map this connection to your accounting software's corresponding list (as described here, in a previous step of this "day one" guide). You're joining links in a chain - the bank sends in real-world spend transactions to RIPA, which get associated with user expenses claims, processed through your company's expenses claim workflow within RIPA, then sent out to your accounting software.
4. Save the user then complete any further accounting setup stages
Once happy with the initial data entry and role setup for the user, click on Add user:
If there are no further setup steps required, you will be taken back to the table containing the list of users. Otherwise, you might be kept in the "Edit user" page, with a message saying that there is more to be done:
Finishing the setup means establishing the proper connections between the new user and your accounting software. It follows the same process that you might have already used for your own RIPA profile; please see that guide page for more information. RIPA Expenses doesn't try to do any of this automatically – if it made a mistake for any reason and linked a RIPA user to the wrong Contact, for example, the consequences could be pretty bad! Instead, it offers likely choices of things like Supplier Contacts for a given user, but ultimately relies on the person adding the new user information to double-check and confirm the connection.
All done. Your new user is now fully set up and ready to log their expenses in RIPA! They will receive a separate email inviting them to set their password and download the mobile app.
5. Adding lots of users quickly
If you have a lot of users to add, you will probably want to use the CSV import feature - read about that here.