Clearing expense reports reimbursed via payroll

Question

We are using i-Expnse and get many of our expense reports submitted through i-Expense that are payroll reimbursed so there is no need to pay them via AP, however, we do not have a good way to clear these expense reports in AP. They remain on hold in our AP system, we understand that we could clear them via the clear payments payment method, but this is one by one and we need to do a batch as we get hundreds of these types of expense reports. Is there another way to clear a batch of expense reports without running a "dummy" check payment batch?

Answer 1

We are running 11.5.10. Invoices are imported into AP via a 3rd party Expense Reporting system. As we know, once the invoices are validated and approved in AP, accounting transactions are created, pushed to GL. Those invoices are now aging, a liablity until paid.
We push the invoices to payroll, Batch Element Entry, pay out of payroll. And now as you stated, you have these invoices hanging in AP (aging). The original approach was to mimic a payment by touching all the tables (good luck), it created a mess. AP_AE_HEADERS, AP_AE_LINES, etc. Not worth it.
Then we went this route, works okay, but the problem is it's hard to control what payroll does, i.e., keeping transactions in sync between AP and Payroll.
If payroll manually creates expense reimbursements or if Payroll not reverses a reimbursemement, good luck keeping keeping in balance, what AP posts to GL and what Payroll posts to GL - we are now basically running 2 tranactional systems. Sorry, I digressed. Here is what we do now. In bank setup, created a bank where we won't run positive pay out of, the cash, and liability for this bank account are the same on so the payment journal that pushes to GL once the payment is made is a wash. We have a special pay group, the interface from Payroll back to AP updates the paygroup for the invoices to this pay group, the user runs a payment batch, confirms, etc,. Pushes to GL and now the invoices are cleared, removed from the Trial Balance. We have form personalizations so the user can never set an invoice to this special paygroup, the paygroup is set behind the scenes via our custom .pkb when interfacing from Payroll back to AP after Payroll has costed the expense reimbursements.
Sure would be much easier if there was an API to call, clear the invoice. I've searched, don't believe one was/is available in 11.5.10. Hope this helps. Good luck.