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Travel & Expense
OVERVIEW
For an organization to have total visibility into their spend, they must consider costs related to employee Travel & Expenses. Coupa’s expense management platform can integrate with third parties that specialize in T&E-related categories. By integrating with Coupa, transactions originating in third party platforms will automatically create expenses and receipts within Coupa, expediting the reimbursement process and enhancing spend visibility for mutual customers. Expense transactions originating in Coupa Expenses can be extracted by third party platforms for turnkey business solutions, covering areas such as VAT reclamation and fraud detection.
DESIGNING THE SOLUTION
1. Pushing Expenses Into Coupa
Basic Integration: Forward Email Receipts to User’s Coupa Account
Coupa offers a simple way to pass expense information into a mutual customer’s account, simply by forwarding a digital receipt to Coupa via email.
Each user has their own unique Coupa email address (i.e. [email protected]). Integrated vendors can forward receipts directly to that email address, and the receipts will be added to their Coupa Expenses account. Vendors can accomplish this in two ways:
- Allow users to manually add their Coupa email address to their vendor profile, so that Coupa automatically receives a copy of each receipt.
- For a given customer (i.e. company), upload a CSV file containing a list of users and their corresponding Coupa email addresses, to automatically add each user’s Coupa email as a secondary notification in their vendor profile.
Enhanced Integration Option
The basic integration above simply adds an expense receipt to the user’s Coupa account. However, to optimize the user experience, integrated vendors should also pass key expense details to Coupa so that expenses can be pre-populated for the end user. Coupa offers several ways to accomplish this:
- Include key expense information in the email subject line. Coupa will parse the subject line and pre-fill key expense fields, including:
- Amount and Currency (i.e. USD 250.25)
- Expense type (i.e. Flight, Hotel, Car Rental, Taxi, Parking, Breakfast, Lunch Dinner)
- For preferred vendors who have significant transaction volume with Coupa customers, we have the 2 options below:
- Coupa can parse the email body and PDF attachments to extract full expense and itinerary details. To support this, vendors must contact Coupa, and Coupa will evaluate each vendor request on a case-by-case basis.
- The vendor must support an open API or other integration format, and make full expense details available to Coupa as described in #1 above
2. Extracting Expense Data from Coupa
Coupa offers a simple way to extract expense information from a mutual customer’s instance via standard REST APIs or CSV integration.
Integrated third-party systems can extract Expense Report transaction and receipt details via the following methods:
- Expense Report API
- Expense Lines API
- Expense Artifacts API
PARTNERS
