Gorilla Expense offers full integration to push expense data to Microsoft Dynamics NAV (various versions). Expenses can be posted to NAV as a General Journal Entry, Purchase Journals, Job Journals and Purchase Invoices (available for NAV 2013 and above). 

Technical Overview

The integration is done using a light-weight .NET based app called Gorilla Expense Integration Manager, which can be installed on any PC or server within the client’s network. It does not have to be installed on the NAV servers. The Gorilla Expense Integration Manager will fetch all “Manager Approved” expense reports from Gorilla Expense cloud based web-app using secured transport mechanism (SSL/HTTPS) and send them to Microsoft Dynamics NAV as Purchase Invoices via the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Web Service. This can be done on-demand by an accounting user or on a scheduled basis by a service account. Below is the high-level representation of the various components involved. 

Please note that this architecture ensures that Gorilla Expense Cloud Infrastructure is unaware of customer ports, firewall, IP Addresses and more importantly any NAV specific details. While this enhances security, it also reduces the complexity associated with opening ports or making modifications to customer’s infrastructure. 

Functional Overview (Purchase Invoice)

This document gives a high-level overview of how an expense report created in Gorilla Expenses is pushed to NAV as one or more Purchase Invoices.

Below is the screenshot of an Expense Report with confirmation number GE102 in Gorilla Expense. This expense report has 3 expense item rows. 2 of them do not have any advanced cost allocation split (Most of our customers belong to this group). We will first see how these two rows for $40 and $45 (marked in red on the screen below) are sent to NAV

Figure 1

The first invoice created below for $85 above (i.e. PI077037), is a combination for these two expense items rows i.e. General Office Expense Type $45 and $40 as shown above  –

Figure 2

When you open the invoice PI077037 (screen shot below), these two expense items rows are shown and are assigned to default dimension called fund (ALLT), and other default dimensions set on user profile (Department -33 and Cost Center Code – 0-100) in Gorilla Expense. Such Gorilla Expense field mapping with NAV dimensions is 100% configurable and our integration app can be completely configured to pick and choose which fields are to be mapped to which dimensions. We can map up to 8 shortcut dimensions. In addition we can map Job, Job Task or any custom field you have can be configured on each expense line to map to the Purchase Invoice Line.

Figure 3

On the above screen, GL Account for General Office as shown on the expense report is mapped as well. The reason for assignment for default values from user profile is that there was no cost allocation on these lines on the expense report, as shown below under the cost allocation column in Figure 4. 

Cost Allocations (Optional – We recommend split feature instead)

The third line on the expense report (Figure 1) for $1,057 has cost allocation as indicated by a pie chart image under “Cost Alloc” column in Figure 4. If there was Cost Allocation assigned, the Integration App would create invoice for each unique company dimension on the allocation. In the example shown on the screen above, there is an expense for Airfare for $1057 that has the cost allocation for two different funds and different dimensions, split equally 50% (i.e. $528.50). The cost allocation is for EMS 50% and AllTech 50%, as shown below on the cost allocation screen for Airfare expense. The “company” field in Gorilla Expense is mapped to Fund in NAV, “Business Unit” and “Cost Accounting value” can be mapped to any Dimension in NAV. 

Such Gorilla Expense field mapping with NAV dimensions is 100% configurable and our integration app can be completely configured to pick and choose which fields are to be mapped to which dimensions. We can map up to 8 shortcut dimensions

Figure 4

As there are 2 allocations for EMS and AllTech, 2 invoices were created in NAV (PI077037 and PI077039 for EMS and Alltech Funds respectively) as shown in the figure 2 on page 1. The detailed view of one the invoices (PI077038 for EMS) is shown below -

Figure 5