Programmatic expense report interface?

Question

I am trying to enter expense reports into ERP 11.5.9 programatically. I went down the path of using the Invoice Gateway, but I ran into a snag when our accountants mentioned that the invoices I am entering are tied to an employee (i.e. an expense report wherein the employee's record is duplicated in the vendors table), not a project. Sure enough, when I carefully observed them entering one of these invoices, I saw that they were choosing type "EXPENSE REPORT".
I tried changing AP.AP_INVOICES_INTERFACE.INVOICE_TYPE_LOOKUP_CODE to "EXPENSE REPORT", but the Payables Open Interface Import rejected the invoices with the error "Invalid Inv Type Lookup: Invalid invoice type lookup code". Looking in AP.AP_INVOICES_ALL, I see many invoices with this invoice type. I'm guessing that either the Invoice Gateway doesn't do invoices of this type, or I am missing fields in AP.AP_INVOICES_INTERFACE that are dependent when "EXPENSE REPORT" is the invoice type.
Is there a way to use the Invoice Gateway to enter expense reports? If so, what is the magic recipe of required fields? If not, is there another way to programmatically enter expense reports?
Message was edited by:
ckonstanski
Reading through the Oracle Internet Expenses Implementation and Administration Guide, I see that there is already a concurrent process called American Express Transaction Loader. I am indeed writing a program to parse an AMEX spreadsheet of airling billing charges and turn the data into ERP invoices. I will look more deeply into this concurrent process in the hopes that it does what I need.

Answer 1

The American Express Transaction Loader is not a complete solution for me. The documentation indicates that it is still necessary for the emloyee to enter an expense report, and for manual matching of credit card transactions to expense reports to occur. Since the company purchases the airline ticket for the employee, it is not possible for the employee to enter an expense report, as he doesn't even know the amount or credit card number.
I can parse the AMEX credit card report myself. I'd like to use this data directly in the creation of expense reports that are complete. Our AMEX report contains all the information I need to match the invoice to an employee (or vendor, if you prefer).
So back to square one: how do I programatically enter an expense report? Is there an interface? Or is it fairly safe to insert data into the AP tables via SQL?