Purpose


RIPA's website supports an allowances system that enables managers to track the spending of cash that has been given to team members in advance of their spending. This is particularly useful for trips where foreign currency may be exchanged all at once before departure. Another use would be for large transactions where the team member does not want to be out of pocket until later reimbursement.


Only out-of-pocket spending may be applied to allowances. Any corporate card expenses have already drawn from the corporate bank account, thus will not draw from a team member's allowance.


Lifecycle


The lifecycle of allowances is as follows:


  • Your organisation follows its internal process to transfer actual funds to a team member.
  • That team member's authorising manager creates an allowance in RIPA for that same sum to represent the above funds. If the allowance was given as foreign currency, specify the local currency equivalent here - i.e., specify the amount that was spent in order to purchase that foreign currency.
  • The team member submits expenses claims as usual. Note there is a checkbox indicating whether a new out-of-pocket expenses claim is "for allowances". When a user has an allowance, new expenses will default to being for allowances.
  • If your RIPA settings do not require that all expenses claims be approved, the expenses claim will immediately reduce the allowance by that expense's local currency amount. Otherwise, this only happens once a claim is approved by an authorising manager.
  • Once all the team member's allowances are spent, new expenses will no longer be set to "for allowances".
  • Spent allowances will be shifted to the "archived" tab on the allowances screen.
  • If the allowance was "overspent", the allowance is not archived but rather reads a negative value. At this point one of three things happens, depending on your organisation's policies:
    1. The allowance can be manually archived. This means the user has personally covered the excess spending, and will not be reimbursed.
    2. The expenses claim may be cancelled and resubmitted as a partial claim for the exact amount that fully depletes the allowance. The remainder of the expenses claim can be submitted as a second partial claim not set to drain from allowances. This portion will be reimbursed.
    3. The authorising manager may increase the amount of the allowance or add a new allowance, and provide the team member with this extra cash, so that all spending is covered by allowances.


Note


Users may be provided more than one allowance at a time. Each allowance is listed separately on the allowances screen, allowing all parties to keep track of each time funds were provided. Allowances are drained oldest to newest. When a team member has more than one allowance, expenses may spend an excess of that older allowance and that excess amount will be put toward the next live allowance.


Expenses claims spent on allowances will not be exported to the accounting system, as they have already been reimbursed in anticipation of the expense and must not also be reimbursed retroactively. It is expected that whatever action was taken to transfer the funds for allowances to the user in the first place will be tracked internally, and exported to your accounting system to fulfil any tax functions your organisation requires.


Further reading


Details on how to expense against allowances are found here and you may learn about provisioning allowances here.