Accrued spending

Overview

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You can prepare and export transactions as accruals instead of actuals, so they’ll be auto-reversed on a future date of your choice. Accounting teams typically book transactions that aren’t fully approved or not fully categorized as accruals by the time they need to close their books.

Exporting actuals and accruals

When you enable accruals, you can accrue existing transactions from your accounting journal and use new transaction types to export as accruals. Here is a summary of supported transactions:

• Card transactions
  • Posted
    • Accrual: √
    • Actual: √
• Reimbursement transactions
  • Submitted [New!]
    • Accrual: √
    • Actual: X
  • Approved
    • Accrual: √
    • Actual: √

Enable accrued spending

In your ERP integration’s settings page, turn on the Enable Accruals setting. Note: This feature is only available for NetSuite and Custom Accounting users.

Set up your accrued expenses GL account

Step 1: Go to Accounting and click Field and rules > Entity settings. Step 2: Select the entity you’d like to configure. Step 3: In the General ledger details section, you can set the desired GL accounts where you want to book accrued expenses under Card accruals liability and Reimbursement accruals liability for card and reimbursement expenses, respectively.

Exporting auto-reversing accruals

Step 1: Go to Accounting > Prepare. Step 2: Select the transactions you want to post as accruals and click Send as accrual. These transactions will be moved to Review, with an Accrual status in the Prepared as column. Note: Employees are not able to make changes to their expenses while the transactions are in Review. Step 3: Go to Review and confirm that the transactions are correctly categorized. Step 4: Select the transactions you want to export as accruals and click Export to open the details window. Step 5: Choose an auto-reversal date for accruals (typically the first of the following month), select your Export type, and click Next.

Step 6: Click Export. On export, we’ll create two journal entries. The first entry will post for the current period, debiting the expense account you chose and crediting your respective Accrued Liability account. The second entry (the reversal entry) will post on the Auto reversal date you chose in Step 5. It will credit the expense account and debit your respective Accrued Liability account. Note: You can only edit and re-post an accrued transaction in your dashboard on or after your chosen auto reversal date. Once an exported transaction auto-reverses, the transaction will reappear in Prepare. You can re-post it either as an actual or accrual by going to Prepare > Review > Export.

Posting period

The ERP effective date determines the posting period for an accrual, and the auto-reversal date determines the posting period of the auto-reversing journal entry for the accrual. You can choose both when you export. If the posting period is closed, it defaults to the accounting preference set in the ERP.