Assure Expenses

What's been happening?

Expenses Integration with Optima

We've added a new feature that connects your Expenses system directly with Optima Health Roster. Now, with custom flag management rules, you can set alerts that notify claimants and approvers if an expense claim is submitted for a date that doesn't match rostered activities. This real-time integration ensures more accurate claims and reduces administrative effort.

In Flag Management, you’ll find a new Integration Flag option, allowing you to configure rules for flagging or blocking expense items based on rostered activities, courses, or on-call duties. You can set the alert level (red, amber, or informational) and choose whether a justification is required. The flag rule can be configured for all Expense Items or limited to a group of Expense Items.

Examples:

• Rostered Activity: Flag any general expense item that doesn’t align with a rostered shift.
• Rostered Course: Use this flag to track study leave expenses, like course fees and travel.
• Rostered On-Call Duty: Apply this to items like “Emergency Call-Out” or “Return to Work Mileage.”

Note: This feature is only available to NHS customers already using Optima Health Roster. You will not see any differences or changes to the way the system works if the feature is not enabled for your Expenses system. 

For Claimants and Approvers

Claimants see real-time flags when adding expense items that don’t match rostered duties, with flag rules re-checked upon claim submission. Approvers will also see these alerts in “Check and Pay Expenses.” In cases where the flag is set to "block," the claim can’t be saved if the expense date and type don’t align with rostered details.

The same changes are present in the mobile app for the claimant and the approver.

Additional information on flag rules can be found in the Knowledge articles, accessible from the Help and Support section of your Expenses system.

Mobile App New User Options

We’ve updated our mobile app to allow individual users to select their own landing page when signing into Expenses to ensure a more personal user experience, and reduce the amount of navigation.

Options include:

• Receipt Wallet
• Current Claims
• GPS Mileage
• Check and Pay Expenses.

The default option is Receipt Wallet.

Driver Licence Checking Services

We've made an enhancement to the driver compliance pack in the Duty of Care module to update the driving licence lookup services to the latest version, to bring you the very latest API Driver Licence Checking Service technology. We've made an enhancement to allow the update of the driver details when you provide consent for the driving licence lookup.

Duty of Care Module

Duty of Care is an employer's moral or legal obligation to ensure the safety or well-being of their employees. Assure Expenses' intuitive duty of care functionality allows you to manage all your employees' vehicle and driving licence documents, with a full audit history.

Removing the burden on managers, claimants upload their own documents; the system then sends an email notification to administrators that documents are ready for approval, streamlining the entire process.

Driver and vehicle documents that are stored against employees are:

• Driving licence
• Vehicle insurance| Class 1 business insurance
• MOT
• Tax
• Service
• Breakdown cover

Assure Expenses now helps you stay compliant by tracking renewals and limitations through automated email alerts and intelligent reports. These alerts notify you well before action is required, and as an added measure, mileage claims can be suspended if key documents expire.

Driver Check
An additional service within the Duty of Care feature for Expenses, Driver Check pulls driver information from the DVLA, auto-populating license details and managing approvals. This feature provides real-time, accurate data on licenses, reducing administrative workload and ensuring compliance. To activate Driver Check, contact your account manager.

Vehicle Check
Assure Expenses also auto-populates the vehicle details, MOT and tax information by using the vehicle registration number, further streamlining record accuracy and reducing manual entries.

The Driver Check service includes:

• Automatic driver consent and license lookup
• Real-time license data, vehicle entitlements, and endorsements
• Claim suspension for drivers with invalid or banned licenses

New Claim Approval Options to Redirect a Claim Based on the Total Reimbursable Amount

We've introduced a new conditional claim approval option, allowing claims to be redirected to a different approver if the reimbursable amount exceeds a specified value. Added to the sign-off groups definition, this option directs higher-value claims to a team, budget holder, or manager as needed.

With this update, claims meeting the set threshold are routed to a higher budget authority, while others follow the standard approval path. Additionally, the API endpoints have been updated to support this new “Only if claim reimbursable amount exceeds” condition, allowing it to be retrieved, created, amended, or deleted as required.

This feature, developed from customer feedback, ensures that only relevant claims are routed to higher authority for approval whilst items such as corporate or fuel card expenses are excluded, simplifying the process and improving accuracy.

Claims that do not meet the condition move to the next stage in the approval process.

Nominated Base Address and Mileage Rules

We’ve added a new “Nominated Base” column in the work address summary grid on both the employee record and the user’s My Details page, clearly marking the designated base address.

These updates apply exclusively to NHS databases, providing a useful indicator for NHS organisations managing junior doctors on rotational training. Now, system administrators can easily identify each employee’s permanent nominated base, even when multiple work addresses are recorded.

We’ve also added a new feature whereby the nominated base can be used in home to base deductions for mileage expenses to ensure accuracy of claims, whilst ensuring that claimants are excluding their “normal commute to work” from any business mileage claims.

NHS Assignment Work Address

We've added two new columns to the Employee Details for the NHS ESR Assignments table in the Work tab. Now, for each assignment record, the new columns display the Assignment Address and the Assignment Postcode.

This gives the system administrator the ability to see the assignment address for each of the employee’s assignment records so that they can easily identify the work addresses if the employee has multiple job roles, bringing all the information into one summary section.

The benefit of this is that the administrator does not need to navigate through additional tabs of information to attain the information.

This enhancement is only applicable to NHS databases.

We are excited to move forward into the first half of the next financial year, which brings us new features to look towards.

We're planning updates to the following areas of Expenses:

• Performance: We’ll be looking at areas of the mobile app where we can make improvements to enhance the user experience. 
• Filter Rules: We’ll be re-writing the way filter rules are created or updated to provide a better overall experience for the system administrator. 
• Mobile App Accessibility and Branding: We’ll be updating our mobile app to improve the accessibility on screens when you’ve selected dark theme and we’ll be updating the colour scheme and product name in line with our corporate branding. 
• Duty of Care Module: We’ll be re-writing our Duty of Care module using newer microservices technology to allow us the flexibility to develop new feature enhancements requested through our customer feedback sessions and ideas portal. 

As always, your feedback is a crucial part of our progress, so please reach out with any suggestions or concerns you may have. 

You may also log your ideas for Expenses in the portal, where other organisations will see the detail and be able to vote to promote the relevance.