When an employee is onsite, it can be too difficult for them to keep a copy of each invoice or bill. Sometimes, employees' lose a bill and are not able to apply for reimbursement as the company policy requires them to submit the bill.
Odoo has a built-in feature to create an expense along with a copy of bills from an incoming e-mail. An employee just has to click a photo of a bill and send an e-mail to the expense gateway to register the expense. If an employee forgets to preserve the copy of a bill, it will not be an issue as the bill is already submitted to the expense application by e-mail.
To enable the registration of an expense based on an e-mail, the first step to configure is the e-mail gateway available at Configuration | Settings of the Expenses application:
The default e-mail gateway is [email protected]. Change it if you want a different e-mail gateway.
The second step is to configure the product code to link the product automatically on an incoming e-mail. The price be can be set later based on the attached bill available in an e-mail:
Now, we are ready to receive an e-mail to register an employee expense.
Let's assume that the employee captures the bill and sends a copy of the bill to the e-mail gateway. The employee writes an e-mail with the receipt as an attachment to create an expense in one click.
If the email subject contains the product's internal reference between brackets as [LUNCH], the product will be set automatically. The expense amount is typed in the mail subject to set it on the expense too. In our case, the subject can be [LUNCH] lunch with customer 192:
The e-mail will be received by the gateway; it will create an expense entry as follows:
It is advisable to send all the expenses along with the expense receipt by e-mail. It will be used to verify the expense amount before preparing the sheet to apply for the reimbursement. The rest of the process remains the same.
