All organizations using Oracle iExpenses have to deal with the issue of unpaid expense reports that belong to resigned/terminated employees. These reports show up on a lot of financial reports and even act as part of encumbrance. The organizations prefer to have all these expense reports deleted from Oracle as these will never be paid but unnecessarily appear in the reports.
I have given a script in a previous article but the script will not work for all expense reports. This article talks about the process of deleting all expense reports.

 

Oracle suggested process

There is no straight forward process of deleting these reports. Oracle has given a workaround for this. We have also created a script which calls internal APIs to delete expense reports but it cannot delete all kinds of expense reports. The script cannot delete reports which have been audited or rejected. This is script is available in another article.
To delete all pending expense reports Oracle has given a workaround in metalink. This process talks about deleting expense report for resigned employees by assigning the ICX_HR_PERSON_ID with the resigned employee to an existing employee. The securing attribute on an Oracle user contains the PERSON_ID of the employee to which the user is attached to.
In other words if the user 13771 is attached to employee number 13771 and he has a PERSON_ID in PER_ALL_PEOPLE_F table 4286 then his entry on the user form will be like the following,
We can add the securing attribute ICX_HR_PERSON_ID to this user for a terminated employee by adding a row and looking for the employee in the Value field,
Select the terminated employee,
Save the form.
Now login to iExpenses responsibility for the existing employee or user 13771.
According to Oracle the expense reports for the terminated employee whom we have attached to this employee should appear and we can withdraw and delete the expense reports. This is not a foolproof method as the report appears only if the expense report has not been approved by manager and is not ready for auditing.
We can view the expense report from this user if we click on Expense Reports link on the top menu.
Change the name to the name of the resigned employee whom we have attached to this employee/user.
Click Go.  You will get to view any expense reports raised by the resigned employee nut you cannot take any actions on those reports like, withdraw or delete. The terminated employee we attached to the existing employee does not have any expense reports and hence no reports are shown.
This method did not work for us for a lot of expense reports of numerous employees. Hence we had to come up with a different way. We had first come up with a concurrent program that I have discussed in the previous article. Then we came up with a robust process that I have described below.

Delete all expense reports

• Activate the employee in HRMS

Responsibility: HRMS Manager
Navigation: People > Enter and Maintain
Search for terminated employee 11606
Click Find
Click Others button and select End Employment
Click on OK
The termination details form show up. Note all the details on this page as we are going to activate the employee for deleting his expense reports that have not been paid. Once the exercise is over we shall terminate the employee with the same details once again.
Click Reverse Termination button
A caution message is shown. Press OK.
The employee is now active. Note the Length of Service field. This field has been updated to show the service length as of today.
Close all forms and requery the employee 11606
Note that the Person Types field show the employee as Permanent instead of Ex-employee.

• Activate the user name for this employee

Responsibility: System Administrator
Navigation: Security > Define > User
In this organization the user name for an employee is the employee number. Hence the employee’s user name is 11606. Query to 11606.
Remove the end date from the user and the iExpense responsibility. Reset the password of the user by entering a new password in the Password field. Remember that Oracle will ask you to change the password on first login to this user.
Save the form.

• Log in to Oracle as user 11606

Available responsibility of the user

We had removed the end date on only the iExpense responsibility. Hence we can view only the iExpense responsibility for this user. Click on this responsibility.
Now we see 1 expense report for this user which has been raised and not been paid. The stats shows as waiting for Accounts Payable. We shall now withdraw this report by clicking on Withdraw button.
We are asked for a confirmation. Click on Yes.
Now the report has been withdrawn. Oracle gives the confirmation message and we can see that the expense report has moved to the Update Expense Reports section on this web form. Now click on Delete button to delete this report.
Oracle requests confirmation. Click Yes button.
The pending expense report does not exist anymore.
Now all the pending expense reports have been deleted for this employee. Let us terminate this employee.

• Terminate the employee who was terminated originally

Go to HRMS Manager responsibility and query for the employee 11606
Click on Others button and select End Employment.
Since the employee has to be terminated as of the previous data we shall change the effective date before we make the change on the employee. Click on the calendar icon on the top menu. If you bring your cursor on the icon it will say “Alter Effective Date”
Click that icon.
This employee was terminated on 31-Oct-2010 and notified about termination on 01-Sep-2010. We shall then change the effective date to 31-Oct-2010.
Click OK. Now start populating the details on this form to terminate the employee.
 Note that the field, Length of Service, has been modified as well. Ensure that the values in the field are entered exactly as before. Click on Terminate button.
 When the Caution message pops up, click on OK button.
Another Caution message pops up. Click OK button. Now the employee is terminated as he was before. Close all forms and query for this employee again, i.e. 11606.
Note that the Person Types now show the employee as Ex-employee. Now the pending expense report for this employee will no longer appear in the Finance team’s list of unpaid expense report.