Method Community

Hi Danny,

Today I showed Expense Report to a prospective Method customer.  They are very interested in MI but I got a few questions :

Do you have a date when this App will be available as Alpha ?

Can a tax code be associated with an expense (for QB Canadian) ?

Can a currency be associated with an expense (for QB Canadian) ?

Thanks !

Hi Michael,

Glad to hear that your client liked what they saw.  

I've addressed your questions below.

Formation QB:

Do you have a date when this App will be available as Alpha ?

The app has already passed the "Alpha" stage.  This was when only the Method Solution Providers had access to the application.  It is currently in the "Beta" stage but since it is a public beta now, anyone who has the invite code is able to install it.  They just have to be cool with using a beta product and expect to have the odd bug.  

Formation QB:

Can a tax code be associated with an expense (for QB Canadian) ?

On the "Expense" screen, I wouldn't imagine that we would add an option for an employee or vendor to select a tax code.  From my research, that isn't very common, at least at the level of an employee or vendor doing the data entry.  If you wanted to customize Method to do that, or course that is always an option.

There is already an option to display a "taxes" field where you can enter the tax amount on a receipt.  This can be turned on via Process Expenses > Preferences and checking the "Allow to enter taxes for expense?" checkbox.  The next time that you open the Expenses screen, a field for "Total Taxes" will appear. 

The one thing that I have on my to-do list is for the Expense Report to total the total amount of taxes at the bottom of the report.

Formation QB:

Can a currency be associated with an expense (for QB Canadian) ?

This is a feature that we plan on adding in the future but isn't an option at the moment.

Hope that helps!

Danny

Hi Danny,

I've experimented with the Tax field included.  It doesn't seem to do anything in QB unless you have a Sales Tax Code associated with the expense account you're posting to.  If a Tax Code is associated with the expense account then it will back calculate the taxes.  My issue is that if you have a rep that travels throughout Canada he may pay 5% GST in one province and 13% HST in another, so that when he enters his expenses he needs to be able to specify which tax code applies so that the correct GST or HST amount is claimed to ARC. 

Would that be complicated to customize?

On the Currency feature, would that be customizable?  Would it link to the multi-currency feature in QB or does the SDK have limitation with multi-currency transactions?

Formation QB:

I've experimented with the Tax field included.  It doesn't seem to do anything in QB unless you have a Sales Tax Code associated with the expense account you're posting to.  If a Tax Code is associated with the expense account then it will back calculate the taxes.  My issue is that if you have a rep that travels throughout Canada he may pay 5% GST in one province and 13% HST in another, so that when he enters his expenses he needs to be able to specify which tax code applies so that the correct GST or HST amount is claimed to ARC. 

Would that be complicated to customize?

I can see where your coming from now.  In terms of it being complicated to customize, it wouldn't be the hardest customization but it also wouldn't be the easiest either.  The downside to this is that you would lose out on any updates made to the original Method Expense Report screen as it is updated. 

In order to track the tax item on a per expense basis, you'd need to add a dropdown list to track the tax.  That wouldn't be too hard.  Then on the process screen, you'd need to edit the Process Report button.  This will be hard.  That button has several actions in it.  You'd need to make sure that the line items get properly interested into QuickBooks with the tax item you selected from the Expense screen.  This way everything lines up properly.  This screen does a lot of the magic in the app. 

Formation QB:

On the Currency feature, would that be customizable?  Would it link to the multi-currency feature in QB or does the SDK have limitation with multi-currency transactions

I haven't played with the multi-currency feature through Method extensively to say how hard or easy this will be.  If you're using the latest version of QuickBooks, you are able to access the currency on the transaction level.  However, keep in mind that the "Expenses" screen in the Expense Report app isn't a QuickBooks transaction screen.  It turns into a transaction down the road but not right away. 

I haven't thought through how I am going to setup this screen when we get to it, however, I imagined us building a feature into the platform that would be able to download the exchange rates daily, this way even users who don't us multi-currency, can have Method figure out what the amount is based on the selected currency.  

This feature is not likely to be in until the next revision of the app.  Also, Multi-Currency customization is pretty complicated.