This integration is based on generating a standardized SEPA payment file which can be imported to nearly all SEPA countries bank systems.
Most commonly this integration is used with Spreadsheet bookkeeping files where you would have an Excel file for bookkeeping and a SEPA-file for payments. SEPA integration can be enabled in addition to an accounting integration to handle reimbursements.
When company has an active SEPA integration:
if company’s IBAN or BIC are missing, none of the reimbursable expenses will be sent to accounting;
if user’s IBAN is missing, their reimbursable expenses will stay in queue.
If an expense is marked as paid, it is excluded from the payments - SEPA payroll is not generated for it. Due to marking an expense as paid, please note if a company has both Netvisor and SEPA enabled, then the payments are sent to Netvisor, but the SEPA payroll for the same expenses is not generated since they’ve already been marked as paid during the Netvisor batch.
SEPA file generated by Bezala is fairly standardized, but some small alterations can be made on the Integrations page. The file can be sent via email to the specified accountants email address or the file can be sent to a SFTP-server.
Below is an example of a generated SEPA-file:
Refund balances
Refund balances are the way Bezala deals with negative amounts when forming SEPA file.
If user’s total amount of reimbursable expenses for the batch is negative, it is not added to the SEPA payroll, since SEPA cannot process negative amounts. Instead, Bezala saves it as a refund balance, and deducts it from user’s reimbursement amount when sending the next batch. If at that time the amount also ends up as negative, it is saved the same way etc.
Refund balances can be seen on SEPA integration’s page in ActiveAdmin.
Excluded users feature
There is an ability to exclude certain users from the SEPA file.
On Edit SEPA integration page in ActiveAdmin, there is a “Users To Reimburse“ section, where all users are selected by default. If user’s checkbox gets un-checked there, on the next batch sending:
user’s reimbursable expenses will not be validated for user IBAN/BIC presence;
user’s amount to be reimbursed will not be added to SEPA file;
the amount will be added to a CSV file, which will be attached to the batch email.
Personal expenses of users who are excluded from SEPA payroll via integration settings are marked as paid when the batch is being sent.
The excluded users CSV file contains the following columns:
user’s name;
user’s email;
user’s external ID, with fallback to user ID in Bezala;
user’s country;
payment message (same as in the SEPA payroll, i.e. “Expense reimbursement DATE (USER_ID)“);
amount to reimburse.