Travel and Expense Management: Credit Card Import
Providing employees with corporate credit and debit cards that they can use to charge business-related expenses is a key component in streamlining the capture and recording of expenses. There are many corporate credit card vendors across the globe, and Microsoft Dynamics® AX 2012 provides a framework to support importing credit card transactions from any of them which provide transaction for import.
The Travel and Expense Management application leverages the Application Integration Framework (AIF) to enable the import of corporate credit card transactions, which are sent to an organization in a file from a corporate credit card vendor. Microsoft customers want to be able to automatically import credit card transaction data from their credit card provider. By using external tools in conjunction with AIF, customers can take almost any credit card file from any vendor and convert its data format to enable the file to be consumed by Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012.
After an AIF inbound port has been configured to import the data into Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, a batch import can be set up to move credit card transactions into the Travel and Expense Management application on a recurring basis. After the transactions are imported into Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, they are available for employees to add to their expense reports.
Requiring employees to manually enter the credit card transactions they have incurred is a very inefficient part of the reporting process. With Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, employees can just select the transactions that they want to add to an expense report, leaving only out-of-pocket expenses to be entered manually.
Scenario 1: enabling the import of a non-xml file into MICROSOFT Dynamics AX 2012
Customers need to be able to automatically import credit card transaction data from a credit card vendor. Typically, such data is provided in a flat file format such as comma-separated values (CSV).
Customers must convert data in the CSV file format to an XML file format that is native to Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. This operation allows data from the provider to be imported into the appropriate database table.
Note This operation is not related to the bulk import feature that is typically implemented as a one-time bulk import. Format conversion is often repeated at periodic intervals.
In this scenario, a customer needs to import a credit card file from a corporate credit card vendor. The credit card vendor has given the customer a sample file to test to determine whether the file can be imported into Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. Although there are some sample file definitions in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, in this scenario none of them work successfully to import the sample file from the credit card vendor.
Isaac, who is the customer’s business application developer, observes that this is a .txt file, opens it up, and notes that it is a tab-delimited file.
Isaac performs the following steps to import the non-XML file into Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012:
1. Creates a custom binary non-XSLT transformation assembly for the sample file that is able to convert the file to an XML format that Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 recognizes. This is accomplished by using a tool external to Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, such as Microsoft BizTalk® Mapper.
2. Develops an integration pipeline that uses the previously mentioned assembly to transform the incoming tab-delimited files into the XML format.
3. Creates and configures an AIF integration port (inbound port).
4. Verifies that the newly created integration port works and that the sample file from the bank can be successfully imported into the Travel and Expense Management application.
Senario 2: importing credit card transactions and adding them to expense reports
After an inbound port has been configured in AIF, it is ready to be used to import corporate credit card transactions into the Travel and Expense Management application. After credit card transactions have been imported into the application, employees can then add these transactions to their expense reports.In this scenario, an employee must perform the following steps to import credit card transactions:
1. Log on to the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 client and navigate to the Travel and Expense Management application.
2. Navigate to Periodic > Credit cards, where two options are available:
· Credit card import from a folder
· Import a specific credit card file
Note The Import a specific credit card file option can be used to test importing a specific file, whereas the Credit card import from a folder option should be used to import files from a folder on a periodic basis.
3. Select one of the two options described above.
4. Point to either a specific file or to a folder, depending on which option the employee has selected.
5. In the format field, select the inbound port that was configured in Scenario 1.
6. To import a file on a periodic basis, the employee selects the Batch tab to define the recurrence.
Assuming that there are transactions in the credit card file that map to employees in the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 database, the corresponding transactions will be available for employees to add to the expense reports that they create in Enterprise Portal. / Configuring an inbound port
Importing credit card transactions
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