Do you have a scenario where individuals need to submit expense reports to obtain reimbursement but are not employees within the organization? We have seen this situation arise in the instance of volunteers, vendors, partners, contractors or other supporting staff that are incurring business expenses on a company’s behalf which need to be reimbursed. Using Office 365’s external user functionality in conjunction with DynamicPoint’s Expense Management application enables users outside of your company to access an intuitive Office 365 or mobile based expense report that is securely accessible to outside resources.
The first challenge in making any expense reimbursement process available to outside users is that of security. Of course you don’t want the expense report available to any person on the web, but at the same time you don’t want to have to create external individuals as users within your security system (most likely Active Directory). This is where Office 365’s external users come in handy. Not only are external users unlicensed (you don’t have to pay extra for them), they are also unlimited. You can manage them directly from your Office 365 admin center and they manage their own passwords using Microsoft Accounts. You can still manage their access and permissions from within SharePoint or using Office 365 groups, but do not have to deal with the creation of the account and inevitable maintenance when a user forgets their sign in or password.
After they have authenticated to Office 365 they would then have access to DynamicPoint’s Expense Management application. Specific permissions can be configured such that the external user can only access certain field options or maybe have a specific workflow that requires additional, or at least different, reviews for approval. Upon final approval, the expense report would be integrated with your ERP for payment in a similar fashion as an internal employee. Review the following Case Study to see how a Global Professional Association streamlines expense reporting for volunteers and employees by leveraging the benefits of Office 365 External Users and DynamicPoint’s Expense Management solution.
The resulting solution would look as follows:
By Mike Marcin, DynamicPoint – SharePoint Expense, Invoice & Requisition Management applications built exclusively for Dynamics GP & NAV.
