Table of Contents

• Prerequisites
• Technical Decisions
• Integration Capabilities
• Exporting Accounting Entries
• Customer Documentation
• Handling Errors

This topic helps you to build an ERP/accounting integration with Pleo. Ensure that you have all the information required, before you initiate the process of configuring the integration.

Prerequisites

Before you start setting up the integration, it is important to know the following:

• Understanding Pleo: It is crucial to understand what Pleo does and how it aligns with the integration you have planned. To get started with your understanding, refer to this section.
• Authentication and Authorisation: Pleo supports both OAuth and API Keys for authorisation. Select the appropriate method, based on what your client supports. To know further, refer Authentication and Authorisation.
• Target audience: Note that only users with admin privileges and bookkeepers are allowed to use this integration.

Technical Decisions

You must decide the following:

• Integration Level : Select the appropriate level of integration, based on what you want your expected outcome to be.
• Integration Deployment: Determine where you want to deploy the integration — on a cloud platform or on premises.

Integration Level

Determine the level of integration you require, based on what APIs you want the integration to access:

• Level 4 is the desired goal and the optimum solution that enables you to set up automated workflows and frequent updates are communicated to the ERP/accounting system.
• Level 3 enables you to seamlessly transfer data related to categories and taxes from Pleo to the ERP/accounting system.
• Level 2 is the minimum integration level we recommend in order to support automated workflows between Pleo and the target ERP/accounting software.

Integration Deployment

You have the following options to deploy your integration (for more information, see Integration Deployment:

• Module or on-premises: The integration would be deployed in the on-premises infrastructure of the client. For example, NetSuite and SAP B1 provide a platform in their environment for hosting the integration. In this option, there is only a single step in authorisation — users needs authorisation from the Pleo server to access the Pleo APIs. Also, no additional frontend development is required as the existing frontend of the ERP/accounting system is used for configuring the integration.
• Cloud platform: If on-premises is unavailable or not supported by your client, deploy the integration on a cloud platform. In this option, there is a two-steps procedure to complete the authentication and authorisation process:
  1. In the Settings > Accounting page of Pleo, the users connect to the ERP/accounting application. Through a smooth session handover, they are redirected to the integration configuration page that is deployed on the cloud platform. The users enable and authenticate the integration on this separate interface.
  2. After the session handover, the users are redirected to the Pleo authorisation server, where they are authorised to access the Pleo APIs.

Integration Capabilities

To utilise Pleo optimally as the spend management platform, ensure that the target ERP/accounting system supports a few capabilities. Hence, before you start with the integration set up, check whether the ERP/accounting system you are planning to integrate with supports the following capabilities:

• Bookkeeping decisions and logic: How and which specific expenses would be bookkept as Journal Entries/Vendor Bills/Expense Reports? For example, out of pocket expenses might be bookkept as vendor bills and reimbursements might be recorded as journal entries. Hence, check the accounting practices of the customer and whether the capabilities are supported by the ERP/accounting system. These types are not exhaustive, yet they are the most commonly used accounting practices; based on the customers accounting practices, configure appropriate integration configurations.
• Uploading receipts to the ERP/accounting application: This is a mandatory requirement; the users must be able to upload attachments to the accounting entries and the integration would support the transition of these entries to the ERP/accounting system. However, there could be rare exceptional scenarios where systems like Netsuite have this feature as an optional functionality as they might be recording their receipts in another solution. So, if you have a use case that does not require this capability, the target ERP/accounting system might have the exception.
• Exporting accounting entries to the ERP/accounting system during closed accounting period: Most businesses often encounter situations where multiple accounting entries are missing crucial information and hence, cannot be bookkept within the corresponding accounting period. But owing to compliance regulations, they have to close the books of accounts for the specific accounting period and cannot make further edits after a specific timeline. These accounting entries must be adjusted in the next cycle. So, the ERP/accounting system must support inclusion of these accounting entries in the next accounting period.
• Bookkeeping with employee accounts: This is an optional requirement — some business require tracking of expenses at the employee level. To cater to this requirement, the ERP/accounting system must support bookkeeping of expenses per employee, based on the employee code mentioned in the accounting entries. When you are configuring the integration, you can specify the type of expenses for which tracking is required at the employee level, for example, out of pocket expenses, reimbursements, and ATM transactions require managing at the employees' level; hence, when these accounting entries are exported to the ERP/accounting system, the expenses would be book kept per employee.

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  Note In your Pleo account, on the People page, you can assign employee codes to the employee records. This help in managing expenses at the employee levels.

• Customising accounting entry description: This is an additional optional capability. Some businesses need a summarised description of accounting entries; the description is a concatenation of other important fields and aids in providing the required information without clicking the details. For example, the description might contain the vendor name, employee information, and the category assigned to the accounting entry. If the business has other requirements, the description might also contain other details.

Exporting Accounting Entries

The primary intent of any ERP/accounting integration with Pleo is to seamlessly export accounting entries.
To know more in detail, refer here.

Customer Documentation

Once the integration is set up, you can develop some documentation for customers and provide the following assistance:

• How the customer can connect to the integration?
• Are there any best practices to follow?
• Troubleshooting problems

Handling Errors

We have listed few commonly encountered errors that you might encounter while configuring the integration:

1. Why are you encountering errors while accessing any Pleo APIs?
   Check whether you have the required scopes to access the relevant APIs.
2. What to do if you cannot use the integration?
   Check the following:
   • On the Pleo side — to use an ERP/accounting integration, you must either be an admin or an external bookkeeper with extended permissions.
   • On the target application side - you might need require specific permissions to access the integration.
   • You must have subscribed to the correct plan of the ERP/accounting system to use the Pleo integration; for example, Visma Economic has specific plans for their users to consume any external integration.
   • Verify the data that you have entered. For example, an incorrect tax code could lead to an error.
3. After the integration is connected, why are tags/tax codes/vendors not automatically synched between Pleo and the target ERP/accounting system?
   Check whether the integration supports any of these — if not, then tags/tax codes/vendors would not automatically sync.