Import Visa Credit Card Transaction into SAP HR Travel Management

Question

Hi Team,
I am new to SAP HR Travel Management. My client supplies the Visa credit cards to their employees for corporate transaction use.
These are reimbursed to the employee and not paid by the company..meaning that the employee needs to pay the amount to the credit card companies.
I have seen some config steps such as
1 ) we need to assign Transaction  Keys to each expense types.
What does this means.. we have 10 diff expense types such as Lodging, AIrfare, Meals, and others. Where do we get the transaction keys from and is it unique to each expense type. Who will provide the transaction Keys. Is it client or visa card company?
2)  Need to convert the Visa file to SAP format.
What do we need to do. I have seen their visa file and it has 54 columns ...I am unable to understand how this can be mapped in SAP.
Please let me know what details I need to know from the client.
Looking forward for your help.
Regards,
SAP HCM

Answer 1

Some of the mappings are obvious: 
Visa A     Your lodging
Visa R     Your Rental car/Gas/Park/Toll
Visa M     Your Personnal meals
The rest are not so obvious.  For that reason, we gave our credit card provider's transaction keys to Accounts Payable and asked them to map to our company's list of expense keys.  Based on their response, we mapped the incoming transaction keys to our expense types.
You will find the majority of incoming expenses are going to be mapped to 'Other' transaction key.  For that reason, we had to set up an expense type TMIS to map 'Other' transaction key to.  In the expense report, TMIS expense type defaults when the ee pulls the expense from the credit card buffer.  But we prevent the ee from saving an expense report with expense type TMIS on it.  In other words, the ee is forced to choose a 'real' expense type from the drop-down list.  Accounts Payable does not accept expense reports with miscellaneous receipts.  Where and how this is done, I can't answer as I am not an ABAPer.  I suspect it occurs in a user exit.  Procedurally, managers are supposed to look for miscellaneous receipts if one somehow escapes the system check.  Accounts Payable also makes this an audit point in their procedure.
Depending on the TPV, our ees have 40-60 expense types from which to select when they add a receipt to an expense report.  Accounts Payable wants a more granular breakdown of expenses and they are the source of the expense types we configured.  For example, where you have Rental car/Gas/Parking/Tolls in your company, we have 4 expense types, one for each receipt type.
A word of caution:  Make sure Visa really truly only has 8 transaction keys.  We thought that same thing about MasterCard.  Then we began receiving expenses with other transaction keys.  The initial list they provided as the most commonly used transaction keys.   We finally got an entire list of their transaction keys and they have more than 8 or 10.  Saves lots of rework...one transaction key at a time.