The new Xero Expenses, announced at Xerocon London 2017, is now available globally.
Here is our plan for rolling out features to support the new Xero Expenses. Please bear in mind that on the 24th July 2018, Xero announced it was retaining Classic Expenses for organisations that have used it in the six months before 10th July. We haven’t seen all the detail behind this, but we may need to adjust the plan to better support the changes.
The plan
The plan for Tripcatcher is:
- To continue to publish mileage expenses to the Xero Classic Expenses but remove the need for Standard Access;
- To publish mileage expenses to Xero Purchases (the API is already available);
- And to publish mileage expenses to the new Xero Expenses (once the new API is available).
This plan gives Xero users plenty of choice on where to publish their Tripcatcher mileage expenses to.
New Xero users will have the choice of publishing their Tripcatcher mileage expenses either to Xero Purchases or to the new Expenses.
Existing Xero users who continue to use Classic Expenses, can carry on publishing Tripcatcher mileage expenses as usual or switch to one of the other Xero integrations.
Xero Standard Access
Tripcatcher currently requires Xero users to have the Xero “Standard Access” role. This user role is great for directors and business owners who need full visibility of their business accounts. However, the Standard Access role provides too much visibility of sensitive business data for employees. Therefore, we will be addressing this with our new integrations.
Incremental Delivery
The work will be delivered incrementally over 4 stages:
These stages are:
- Release a new Tripcatcher Expense Claim page (Update – this was released on Sunday 2nd September 2018);
- Release an integration to Xero Purchases (Update – this was released on Wednesday 17th October 2018);
- Update the Partner Account to allow users to publish to Xero without requiring Standard Access (Update – this functionality was released on 17th February 2019);
- Release an integration to the new Xero Expenses
Tripcatcher Expense Claim page
Before we start the new integrations with Xero, we need to upgrade the Tripcatcher Expense Claim page. We have been listening to your feedback and have incorporated some much needed enhancements too.
Enhancements:
- Edit expenses before they are published;
- Publish a selected date range of mileage (this year to date, this month etc);
- Export to Excel.
Integration to Xero Purchases
(Update – this functionality is now available.) Next, we will start work on the integration with Xero Purchases. We’ve had many requests for this integration as the Purchases module offers additional functionality over the Classic Expenses module. The main functionality requested is the ability to assign a mileage expense to a customer, which can be recovered when the client is next invoiced. This functionality is available within Purchases but not within the Classic Expenses.
For new Xero users who do not have access to the Classic Expenses, publishing to the Purchases module will be the only option until the new Xero Expenses API is available.
Publishing without Standard Access
(Update – this functionality is now available.) Once users can publish to the Xero Purchases module, the next step is to enable users to publish directly to Xero without requiring Standard Access. To get round this issue, at the moment, many employees (and users without Xero Standard Access) use the print to PDF functionality.
Publishing without Standard Access will be implemented with all the integrations.
Integration to the new Xero Expenses
(Update – as of December 2019, Xero is no longer planning to release a new Expenses API, it is recommending Bills instead.) Finally, the last step in this plan is to integrate Tripcatcher with the new Xero Expenses. We can only start this work once the new Xero Expenses API is available and the work above is completed.
Want to know more?
If you want to know more about the current Tripcatcher integration with Xero then please see our Xero integration for partners or our Xero integration page for individuals page for more details.
Many Thanks
Thanks to everyone who provided feedback, we greatly appreciate it! It really does help us make Tripcatcher a better product.
