Updates to the Expense Management App in Finance and Supply Chain Management
Staying on top of employees and tracking expenses shouldn’t require a desktop setup, a spreadsheet, and guesswork. Luckily, with the latest release of the Expense Management mobile app in Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management (F&SCM), you can simplify how your organization captures, manages, and approves expenses through mobile devices.
In this blog and video, we’ll walk through three key enhancements to the app and review some core capabilities and use cases to demonstrate how it can help you track expenses more effectively. These updates directly address common friction points that we see with clients, including:
- Streamlining expense creation
- Improving receipt clarity
- Ensuring policy compliance without slowing users down
Before You Start…
To use these new enhancements on the app, your system needs to be updated to one of the following supported versions of Dynamics 365 F&SCM:
Streamlining Capabilities and Efficiency: New Features in the Expense Management App
While there are many great enhancements to the Expense Management app in this release, we wanted to highlight three that address common pain points we regularly see with clients.
Let’s dive right into these new features:
Enhancement 1: Create Expenses Within Reports and Then Expense Lines
One of the most impactful improvements in this release is the ability to create expenses directly within an expense report.
Previously, users had to create an expense report separately, save it, create the expense in another screen, save that, then navigate back to the report to attach the expense.
This extra navigation was inconvenient and often caused delays, leading to incomplete or late submissions. Now, users can simply:
- Create a new expense report
- Add expense lines directly within it
- Capture receipts and details without leaving the report
While this might seem like a small change, it significantly improves usability and aligns processes with how users naturally think about expenses as part of a single report, not as disconnected entries.
Enhancement 2: Receipt Naming and Notes
A major pain point we’ve seen with clients in the past is a constant struggle with reconciling receipts with system-generated file names. Before this enhancement, uploaded receipts were assigned random, non-editable names, making it difficult to identify and/or audit them later.
In this release, users can now:
- Assign meaningful names to receipts at upload
- Edit those names later if needed
- Add notes, contextual details, or descriptions to each receipt
This improvement optimizes auditability, provides user clarity, and streamlines communication between employees and approvers, saving your team valuable time and bringing more transparency and organization to your expense processes.
Enhancement 3: Ability to Provide Justification
Expense policies are critical to your processes. However, if they are not managed well, they can create serious bottlenecks in the user experience.
Previously, if a user triggered a policy violation (for example, exceeding a spending limit), the app would notify them. While that seems straightforward, the issue is that the user couldn’t resolve it within the app. They had to spend valuable time switching to a desktop to enter a justification before proceeding.
With this update, users can now:
- View policy violations directly in the app
- Enter justification reasons on the spot
- Add justifications at both the report and line level
This update will eliminate workflow interruptions, speed up submissions, and ensure better compliance without sacrificing usability.
It’s a major step forward in making policy enforcement both effective and user-friendly.
See These Updates in Action
One of the best parts of these features is that they all work in tandem in the same workflow. In practice, these enhancements come together in a seamless mobile experience.
A typical flow now looks like this:
1) A user creates a new expense report from their phone by clicking the “+” sign and then inputs the report details.
2) The user will then click on “+Attach expenses”
While the Attach expenses feature is nothing new, you will see the new enhancements once you move to that next screen. Instead of just being able to check the unattached expenses and add them, there is now a button to “Create new expense.”
Clicking this button will take you to the next stage.
3) Capture a Receipt and Fill in Details
In the next stage, you can simply take a picture of the receipt, like before, but the big difference is that you can now assign it a meaningful and relevant name. Then, you can add any notes that provide additional context.
Once you click “Done”, you should get a notification that the receipt was created successfully.
4) Fill out Detailed Expense Information
After the receipt is created and attached, you can fill out additional information about the expense and provide justifications if it exceeds a limit or violates an internal policy.
The app will tell you the expense, and the receipt went through successfully. However, if it detects a policy violation, you will see that when you return to the “Attach expense screen.” Despite this, you can click “Done” to add the expense to your report and go back to the “Edit report (draft)” screen.
5) Address Policy Violation with Justification Reason
You won’t be able to create and submit the expense report with an outstanding policy violation. This is where that third enhancement becomes vital.
What you will do next is open the expense back up and find the red bar at the top of the screen that notifies you of the violation. Click on “View details”.
You will then see why the policy was violated.
Instead of having to find a computer and fill in your justification that way, you can now just do it from your mobile app. Once you fill that out, you can submit the expense, and the system will direct it to the appropriate approver.
Once approved, you can save the expense, validate it, and submit it.
The kicker is that this all happens in one easy, intuitive workflow on your mobile device.
The Expense Management app was a huge game-changer when it came to capturing receipts, adding expenses, creating and submitting reports, and tracking expenses. Now, it’s even better. These updates are a great example of how Microsoft continues to refine the user experience in Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management. Realizing the full value of these enhancements, however, requires the right implementation approach.
Talk to the Stoneridge Team Today!
Stoneridge Software specializes in helping organizations not only deploy these features, but also align them with real-world business processes. From configuring expense policies to optimizing mobile workflows and driving user adoption, the right partner makes all the difference.
Get in touch with us today to modernize your expense management processes and explore how new Dynamics 365 capabilities can deliver you effective and measurable value.
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