How to automate expense management in Certinia

Key takeaways

• Certinia is built on Salesforce for services businesses, with Professional Services Cloud (PSA) and Financial Management Cloud.
• PSA groups expenses into reports per resource and project; approved reports become payable invoices through the PSA–Accounting Connector.
• Company card charges are a separate stream, and each needs a GLA, up to four dimensions and often a project.
• Vergo proposes those values from history, texts for receipts and records cash entries or purchase invoices through the API.

Where should you go next?

• Vergo's Certinia integration
• What expense management software integrates with Certinia?
• Get started with Vergo

How do you automate expense management in Certinia, step by step?

1. Connect Certinia. Vergo connects through Certinia's public API, reads your general ledger accounts and dimensions, and records coded card spend as cash entries or purchase invoices, with reimbursements as purchase invoices to the employee as vendor.
2. Connect your existing cards. Connecting your existing cards involves no card applications, no re-issuing and no banking change.
3. Collect receipts by text. Employees handle everything by text message — no app to download, no portal login — and Vergo chases missing receipts itself instead of waiting for a report.
4. Code GLA, dimensions and project. Vergo proposes each value per receipt line and marks what is billable to the client.
5. Record in Certinia. Confirmed card spend becomes cash entries or purchase invoices, ready to match against the imported bank statement.

What does Certinia need on each card transaction?

• General Ledger Account: the expense GLA.
• Dimensions 1–4: your analysis dimensions, such as practice, region or cost centre.
• Project: where the cost belongs to client work.
• Billable flag: PSA bills billable expenses as pass-through revenue.

Where does PSA stop and automation start?

PSA expense reports work well for consultants claiming travel against an assignment: photo receipts on mobile, Auto Mileage, limits by expense type and a connector that sets the expense GLA from the type and billable flag. A company card charge has no report around it. It arrives on a statement, and finance decides the GLA, dimensions and project. Vergo reads the receipt itself, line by line, and predicts the GL account from what was actually bought, not just the vendor name on the header, and proposes dimensions from how similar spend was analysed.

A practical example

An IT services firm on Certinia gives delivery leads cards. One buys a software licence for a client project and a team lunch on the same trip. Vergo asks for both receipts by text, then proposes the software GLA, the delivery practice dimension and the client project as billable for the licence, and the staff welfare GLA for the lunch. The controller confirms, and both entries are recorded in Certinia.

How Vergo handles this

Vergo proposes the coding by inference from your own accounting structure and history — no rule library to build, no keyword lists to maintain, and new vendors are coded on first sight. In Certinia, that includes the dimension values your team applied, so the analysis stays consistent without a mapping table. Approval workflows are optional and fit how you already control spend: route by GL account, by amount, or by project — or skip approval flows entirely and let policy flags catch only what breaks a rule.