Seeing the wood for the trees

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in February 2019 and has been revamped and updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

According to a 2025 study by Airwallex, the average UK worker will claim a total of £4,255 per year in expenses.

Given that most companies will have several employees claiming expenses, it is important that you have a system of checks and balances that ensure the expenditure is a valid business expense, is deductible when it can be and helps you understand that spend, so that you can drive cost saving changes.

Zetadocs Expenses helps finance teams to control expense spend. Each item of expenditure is easily captured by a submitting employee on their phone and is coded automatically. Approved expenses are automatically checked to ensure they comply with company policy, ahead of being automatically exported into Business Central for reimbursement or reconciliation. 

To provide even greater control over employee expenses and to provide actionable insights, Zetadocs Expenses gives real-time information on spending by person, project, team etc to help you shape your policies and processes to maximize time savings and control expense spend.

Actionable insights

Finance teams like to keep their chart of accounts tidy. As a result, we find that most travel and subsistence expenses end up in a small number of buckets or G/L accounts, typically too few to do any form of decent analysis at a more granular level to spot trends and anomalies.

That’s where the Zetadocs Expenses Reporting feed comes to your aid. It enables you to quickly identify trends in expenditure at the more granular expense type level. It’s far easier to spot a trend on flight spend at the expense level, than at the chart of account level of “Travel”. This would require you to dig into each purchase invoice line coded to Travel, then sift out airfare from trains, taxis, and other modes of travel. Not a fun task and very time consuming if you only rely on G/L accounts.

Reporting feed

Learning a new reporting or analytical tool is never that much fun. All finance teams are already very comfortable using Microsoft Excel for detailed analysis and some are now using Microsoft PowerBI as their business intelligence tool, given its integration with Business Central. As Excel and PowerBI are great at consuming external data sources that auto refresh, we decided to create the Zetadocs Expenses Reporting feed.

The Zetadocs Expenses Reporting feed uses the OData standard to present your expense data for use with these popular tools. Once connected to the feed, you can then use the flat expenses table to slice and dice your expense data with your analysis tool of choice.

We’ve made each column in the expense table easy to understand and have also defined each one in the Zetadocs Expenses Help along with details on how to connect.

Reporting template

The Zetadocs Expenses Reporting template is a PowerBI template that presents a set of visualizations and standard reports out of the box. We’ve chosen to display what we think are the most useful charts below, which can be drilled through to see further details, right down to the individual expenses.

The template includes charts related to Business Central Dimensions (e.g. ‘Department’ & ‘Area’), which enables further analysis of your departmental and area (or project) spend. These can all be viewed per month, per financial year or overall spend. If other Business Central Dimensions are more useful, then they can be simply configured in the Zetadocs Expenses system settings. Any other custom fields that you may have in Zetadocs Expenses can also be included in the reporting feed.

The reporting template can be tailored to suit your business needs, using the PowerBI desktop app and can then be published for wider use within the business.

Try it yourself

The Zetadocs Expenses Reporting feed is available for all customers with an Essentials or Plus subscription.

If you are interested in using the reporting template, this is available to download from the software updates page.

You can learn more about using the Zetadocs Expenses reporting feed for real-time insights by watching this short video.