iDocuments Open Banking for Expenses

First published on: 02/26/2024/10:37 am

User Guide

Overview

Introduction

This document provides an overview of the iDocuments Open Banking Expenses functionality.

This function is enabled with the Credit and Debit card processes and is restricted to the Credit Card File Setup screen, typically for administrators, for most of the configuration.  Authorisation of a bank integration can also be assigned to a user where needed as part of the credit card import screen.

No bank details are stored in iDocuments, and all interactions are with Open Banking via a timed token that can be revoked from the bank side as needed.

Open Banking Authorisations

Introduction

If the company setting ‘Using Open Banking’ is enabled, then the Credit Card File Setup page will show the Open Banking Section.

After pressing the ‘Add’ button, a new Account will be created.

At this point, the administrator can authorise a credit card account – after pressing Authorise the user is redirected to the Truelayer.com website to continue by selecting the country and then the bank within that country.

Note: the prompt will show the access areas requested, which will be transactions and user details to determine which account.   No payment information is available, and therefore no payment is possible (The iDocuments API does not contain any of the open banking payment information, so it is not possible to trigger any payments by this method)

After authorisation, the entry will now show the option of re-authorising, and you can assign it to a user and change the account name if required.  The authorisation lasts for up to 90 days (bank dependent) and so this button can be used to go through the authorisation again without having to recreate the entry.

There is also an option to ‘De-Authorise’ to remove the use of this record (and ‘Remove’ to remove it altogether).

The Account and Authoriser options allow the administrator to assign an account to users for upload and if they should be allowed to maintain the card authorisations.

The ‘Cards’ popup also allows the administrator to assign the credit card to a specific user, so that any import is sent to them to complete after downloading.  This saves on the process of going into the user area and assigning a card manually, which would then look as below, where the top one is the Open Banking card reference.

The open banking option is then available for credit card uploads using the ‘Start Open Banking’ option.

Downloads

From the ‘Start Open Banking’ option, the user will then be prompted to select an account (if multiple accounts are available) and then a date range for download. 

On first use, it will default to the current month, but these can be modified as required.

Once there is history in the system, then the ‘From’ date will be the next date after the last download.

If something was purposefully removed from an earlier date, then the ‘From’ date can be reduced as needed.

Press ‘Download’ and it will connect to the account and download all entries for that date range.

The reference will be defaulted but can be updated if preferred.

Credits are automatically removed from the download where they are payments that are not required to be processed but can be included using the slider button to add / remove individually or at the top status slider to include/remove for all. 

Similarly, any transactions not wanting to download can be removed in the same way.

The two tick boxes allow for excluded historical items to be shown, plus any excluded transactions in the current date range.

After selecting ‘Create expense’, any errors will be shown in the exact same way as the spreadsheet upload, so if the user is not assigned to the card in their user settings, the whole upload is affected.

As the authorisations are account based, there are two options:

• When selecting transactions, deselect any that are not relevant to a card assigned to a user.
• When they are first authorised, the Open Banking process will ask for which cards to authorise, and you can select one card each time, so that each is a separate account, rather than having one account record in iDocuments with multiple cards being downloaded together.

Once resolved, then the download can be recreated – note when retrying the dates will need to be amended as the dates would have been updated to the last time it ran.

If successful, you will get the same message as the manual entries uploaded with a spreadsheet identifying the expense details that have been created.

Debit Cards

The process is the same for Debit Cards, although they are more likely to be assigned to a user to perform the authorisation stages.

The main difference being that the debit card import will create an expense rather than a credit card expense.

Logs

All authorisations and access permission changes are in the logs accessible from the set-up screen.

Previous

Next