Expense Import

Permissions and Settings

Imports are limited to 2000 cost cards at a time.

Different permissions are required depending on what kind of expenses you are trying to import.

Expense Reports

To upload cost cards to an expense report you must have one of the following:

• Be a resource 
• Have the cost center permission Maintain Expenses 

Soft Costs

To upload cost cards to soft cost document:

• Have the cost center permission Maintain Soft Costs

• Have the cost center permission Maintain Vendor Invoices

Supported File Formats

Projector supports the following formats

Expense Report Fields

The below table contains all the fields that you can map into an expense report cost card. Please notice that there are no fields for importing currency and FX rates. These need to be specified manually after the import process is complete.

Vendor Invoice and Soft Cost Fields

The below table contains all the fields that you can map into a soft cost or vendor invoice cost card.

In Practice

Follow these steps to execute your import.

Start Import

For vendor invoices and soft costs, edit any document or create a new one. Then click + | Import Cost Cards.

For expense reports, open any existing expense report. At the bottom of the screen click   at the bottom of the screen.

Choose Import File

Drag and drop a file into the import wizard or browse to one on your system. See the file types section above to see types we support. Once the file has finished uploading the wizard automatically moves to step two.

Map Fields

This is where you specify how the information in the uploaded file maps into Projector. On the left is a list of fields that you can import data into. All fields are optional.

Projector does its best to automatically map your file to the available fields. Manually fix any mismapped fields or specify mappings as needed. To do this, use the dropdown list next to a field. For example, Incurred Date in Projector maps to Bill Date on my credit card statement.  We even show a little bit of preview data from your file so that you can ensure everything is correct.

Saved Mappings

If you frequently upload a file in the same format, then you can optionally save your import settings for reuse later on. At the bottom of the form, simply type in a unique name so that you can identify it later. The next time you import cost cards, you'll have a nice dropdown at the top of the page where you can specify the mapping definition you want to use.

Review Expenses

Once you have completed your mapping, move onto step 3 - Review. Here you make corrections, determine which of the expenses you wish to import, and delete expenses that you are not interested in. 

To begin, click an expense in the left hand column. You can multi-select by holding the ctrl key and clicking individual expenses or by holding the shift key to select a range of expenses. 

If a cost card is appears with a green border on the left and a green check icon, then it is ready for import.

If a cost card appears with a red border on the left and a red circle with an exclamation point, then the item must be edited in order to be ready for import.

Images below show the two different states.

Information about the card or cards is shown in the right hand pane.

Make changes as you deem necessary. Anything highlighted in red requires attention before it can be imported. For example, if the imported expense type could not be found in Projector, you will need to pick a valid one from the dropdown list. If you have selected multiple cards at once, then all of them will change. 

Any expenses that were not processed are saved for later and will appear the next time you open the import expense dialogue. If you are done with them, then use the Delete link to remove them from the sheet. All cards that appear with the green border and are valid will be imported. You must select and delete any cost cards you do not want to import.

After you click Import, you will see your new cost cards added to the expense document, where you can then approve them.