As an administrator, you use Groups to assign cardholders, managers, and accountants to different cost centres. It is important to set your groups up correctly to get the most out of the platform, so we have created this article to explain how groups work and show you how to configure them.

Understanding groups

Groups are the building blocks of your Expensemate account. It determines who is responsible for authorisations and administration but also enables seamless allocation of expenses.

There are many creative use cases for Groups. Some customers use it to assign to transactions to jobs, others use it for matching to budgets, and some for costs centres within a business. The use cases are endless, but at its core groups ensure that expenses are assigned and allocated to a particular area so that the right person approves expenses.

Where is the Groups section?

To access Groups, click Settings from the portal menu and select Groups from the dropdown.

How to create a group

To create a group, click the Add New Group button located at the bottom of the Group Overview screen.

From here, give your group a name, unique code and add your users to their roles.

In order to add a user to a group they must first be an active cardholder. If you want to add a user who does not have a card, speak with your account manager, and they can set this up for you.

You can create as many groups as you need and assign users to multiple groups and roles.

Defining User Roles in A Group

Once groups have been created, administrators will need to assign roles to users within each group to ensure transactions can be authorised and processed effectively. In order to do so, there are 3 roles that exist within each group:

1. Cardholders: Can allocate expenses to a group
2. Manager: Review and approve expenses in a group
3. Accountant: Can check coding, VAT, and categorisation of an expense

Note: users have multiple roles, as well as feature in multiple groups.

For a full description of user roles, view here.

How groups work in practice

Once your groups are set up, cardholders can allocate an expense to a group they belong to, relevant managers can authorise them, and accountants can subsequently administer the transactions.

It is important to note that groups will only appear in a cardholder's transaction journey if a group code has been assigned to the group.

Cardholders can only allocate an expense to one group at a time. If you have multiple managers in a group, all managers can authorise expenses but the expense can only be authorised once.