What’s new in Zetadocs Expenses July 2022 update

Export to Business Central Employee accounts

Changes in this update

Feature enhancements

Export to Business Central Employee accounts

You can now configure Zetadocs Expenses to export reimbursable expenses to the submitter’s Employee account in Business Central instead of exporting to a vendor account.

The export option and Employee account number is configured in the Manage User screen.  The export option is set independently for each Zetadocs Expenses user, so you can export to Employee accounts for users who have these and export to a shared vendor account for other users.

This feature requires the Extension for Business Central to be upgraded to the version included in this release (or a later version).  It is not supported with the NAV codeunits used with older NAV systems.

Export to Business Central vendor account journal

You can now export reimbursable expenses to a vendor account using journals instead of a purchase invoice, so reimbursable expenses and expenses for non-reimbursable payment cards can be exported in a similar way.

This feature requires the Extension for Business Central to be upgraded to the version included in this release (or a later version).  It is not supported with the NAV codeunits used with older NAV systems.

Support date filters with OData reporting feed

When you connect to the OData reporting feed with Excel or PowerBI, you can include date filters using the query editor tool.  This includes options for fixed date ranges (eg “between Jan 1 and Jan 31”) and for dynamic ranges (eg “last month” or “last 60 days”).

Previously the OData reporting feed returned all expenses and any date filtering was performed by Excel and PowerBI.  The feed now applies date filters before returning the expense data.  This reduces the number of expenses which are returned and significantly reduces the time taken to load expense data when performing end of month processing on large systems.

The feed supports single date range filters on the expense date and/or approval date.  This supports fixed date ranges, and also dynamic ranges (eg “last month”) which Excel and PowerBI convert to a fixed range based on the current date.

The reporting feed does not support combined “OR” filters (eg “approved last month OR approved by Bob”) or exact matches (eg “approved on Jan 1”).  These filters will still be applied by Excel or PowerBI, but the reporting feed will return the full data set without any performance improvements.

If you are using the reporting feed for month or year end processing, we recommend that you edit the query to apply a date filter to improve performance.  Please contact Equisys for more information if required.

Improve speed of client data refresh

We have improved the performance of the client app when refreshing data from the server.  This reduces the time to sign in or start the client app on accounts with a large number of expenses or approval tasks.  It also improves the responsiveness of desktop and mobile client apps.

Reject new approval tasks if the approver account has been disabled

When you submit a report for approval, the client only displays approvers whose accounts are enabled and have the required approver or processor role.

When someone completes an approval task, the system creates a new task for the next approver or processor in the approval chain.  Previously if that user account had been disabled or no longer had the correct role the report would set to an error state, requiring action by Equisys to reset the approval process. 

The approval processor now checks the user status when creating a new task, and if the account is disabled or the user no longer has the required role the system will automatically reject the approval task and add a message to the report history before notifying the original submitter.

Improved protection against duplicate exports

When the system exports a report to Business Central it sends a request to the Business Central system.  Usually it will receive a response from Business Central to say whether the operation succeeded or failed.  However if it does not receive a response for any reason then the system is not able to determine whether any records have been created in Business Central.

Previously if no response was received the server would assume the operation had failed and retry it automatically.  However if the previous request had succeeded then this could result in a duplicate record being created in Business Central on rare occasions.

We have now changed the export behavior if this happens so that the server will reset the report status to “awaiting export” without any automatic retry.  This will allow the finance processor to remove any records which have been created before retrying the export operation.

Quality and performance improvements

This update corrects the following issues:

Status screen can omit some draft PCR reports

The status screen displays a list of reports which have been submitted for approval and any draft (unsubmitted) Payment Card Reports.  The date range for the report is configured on the settings screen in the Zetadocs Expenses app.

The screen will show a maximum of 1,000 reports.  Previously, submitted reports were given precedence when applying this limit, which meant that draft Payment Card Report could be omitted incorrectly if there were more than 1,000 reports in the configured date range.

This issue was corrected on June 22, 2022.

Desktop client stops retrieving configuration changes

We have corrected an issue in the desktop browser client which caused the refresh process to stop working in some circumstances.  The issue meant that the client did not receive configuration changes made on the server or new expenses created by the user on their phone.

Additional upgrade steps

Extension for Business Central

Customers using the extension with a Business Central public cloud system should update this from the Manage Apps page in the Business Central admin center.  Updates are typically available within a few days of release for systems using the current version of Business Central.  Updates for older Business Central versions may also be available, depending on the Microsoft support and update policy at the time of release.

Customers using the extension with a Business Central on-premises system can download the extension from the Equisys software updates page, as part of the Zetadocs Expenses Connector download package.

To upgrade from an older version of the extension please contact your Business Central reseller, or contact Equisys for further assistance if required.

This release is compatible with previous versions of the Extension for Business Central.

NAV Server Components

The NAV Server Components have not been updated in this release.

This release is compatible with previous versions of the NAV Server Components (versions 3.3.18178 and later).

Reporting Template

The PowerBI Reporting Template has not been updated in this release.

Mobile apps

Installed mobile apps will be updated automatically on mobile devices where this is enabled.

Known issues with released features

First export to an Employee account may fail

If you configure a user to export to an Employee account, the system checks that the installed version of the Extension for Business Central supports that when it exports a report for that user.  If the Extension has not been upgraded then the export will fail and a message saying that you must upgrade the Extension will be added to the report history.

In some circumstances the first export attempt to a company after upgrading the Extension may still use the previous version of the Extension for this check causing the export to fail with this message.  This can be corrected simply by retrying the export operation from the client Status screen.