VAT4U offers a direct API connection to Emburse Professional. The connector reads the expense lines of your expense reports and their receipt images, and prepares them for import into VAT4U. It can run on demand or on a schedule.
The connection is read-only: VAT4U never writes back to Emburse. Nothing in Emburse is modified, approved or deleted.
Prerequisites
You need two values from Emburse Professional:
an API key
an API secret
Both are generated by an Emburse Professional administrator. Access to the API depends on your Emburse Professional plan. If you cannot find where to generate the keys, ask your Emburse account manager or Emburse support to enable API access. This is something only Emburse can grant.
How to obtain Emburse API credentials
Sign in to Emburse Professional as an administrator.
Open Configuration and go to the API keys section.
Generate a new API key and secret. Give it a name that identifies VAT4U, so it can be recognised and rotated later.
Copy both values. The secret is shown only once.
Keep the pair for the activation step below.
For details, see the Emburse Professional Help Center article "Generating an API Key and Secret" and the "API Overview" article.
An official Certify guide on API keys can be found here.
Activating the Emburse connector in VAT4U
Open the company you want to connect, go to its Settings, and select the Connectors tab.
Click the Emburse tile. The panel opens with status Inactive.
Click Activate Emburse integration.
Enter the API key and API secret, then click Save connection details. Both values are encrypted before they are stored.
VAT4U immediately tests the connection by asking Emburse for one day of expenses. A green check mark means you are connected. A red icon means the key or secret needs another look.
Use Retry connection at any time to re-run the test.
Once the status shows Active, the extraction list appears below and the Emburse tile is marked ON on the Connectors page.
Multi-company setups: activate the connector on the main group entity. Expenses imported into other entities of the same group will still be able to fetch their receipts through the group entity's connection.
Security note: the API secret is never displayed back to you. When Emburse rotates it, use Show connection details → Edit and re-enter both values. Deactivating deletes the stored credentials and stops all extractions, including scheduled ones. Expenses already imported stay in VAT4U untouched.
Data extraction from Emburse
How extraction works
An extraction asks the Emburse API for all expenses of expense reports processed in a date range you choose, and writes them to a CSV file, one row per expense line. An extraction never changes your VAT4U data on its own. Nothing appears in your expense list until you import the extracted file, so you can always inspect what was pulled before committing to it.
Emburse only exposes expense lines once their expense report has been processed. The date range is therefore matched against the processed date of the report, not the expense date and not the submission date. An expense from January whose report was processed in March is picked up by a March extraction.
Large periods are fine: the extraction pages through Emburse's results until it has everything in the range.
Extraction parameters
Field | Required | What it does |
startDate | Yes | Start of the processed-date range. Reports processed on this date are included. |
endDate | Yes | End of the processed-date range. Reports processed on this date are included. |
processed | No | Which expense reports to read lines from. Processed reports only (Emburse default), Unprocessed reports only, or Both. Leave empty for processed reports only. Unprocessed reports may still change before approval, so we recommend importing processed reports for VAT recovery. |
includeDisapproved | No | Yes also retrieves expenses that were disapproved in Emburse. Leave empty to exclude them, which is the Emburse default. |
Deduplicate expenses | Ticked by default | Leaves out expense lines that were already extracted for this company. See "Deduplication" below. |
How the range is read: both dates are inclusive. To cover the whole of March, set 01.03. to 31.03. Consecutive ranges therefore run end-to-start with no gap.
What is extracted
The extracted file is a semicolon-separated CSV with one row per expense line. These are the fields VAT4U pulls from Emburse:
Identifiers
Field | Description |
| Unique ID of the expense line in Emburse. Used as the transaction identifier in VAT4U and for deduplication. |
| ID of the expense report the line belongs to. Used as the travel report identifier in VAT4U. |
| Name of the expense report as given by the traveller. |
| ID of the receipt attached to the line, empty when the line has no receipt. |
| Link to the receipt image in Emburse. |
| Generated by VAT4U from the expense ID. Map this field as the document source, see "Importing data" below. |
Employee and organisation
Field | Description |
| The traveller who reported the expense. |
| The traveller's department. |
| The up to five general-ledger dimensions of the expense report (for example cost centre, project or client), each with its label, selected value and code. |
| The up to five free-text general-ledger dimensions of the expense line, each with its label and value. |
Expense details
Field | Description |
| Emburse expense type (for example Cash Expense, Lodging, Meals, Travel, Mileage). |
| The Emburse expense category and its GL code. Map the category to VAT4U categories during import. |
| Date of the expense as reported. |
| Accounting posting date. |
| When the expense report was processed and whether it is processed (Yes/No). |
| Current status of the line in Emburse and the last workflow action. |
| Merchant or vendor name. |
| Free-text location as entered by the traveller. Not a country field, see the limitation below. |
| Origin and destination for travel and mileage lines. |
| Business purpose or comment entered by the traveller. |
Amounts
Field | Description |
| The expense amount in the report currency. |
| The amount as submitted in the original receipt currency. Use these as gross amount and currency when the receipt is in a foreign currency. |
| Amount reimbursed to the employee. |
| Yes/No flags as set in Emburse. |
| VAT amount entered in Emburse, if your Emburse configuration captures it. |
| Canadian HST and PST amounts, if captured. |
| Corporate card name and the last digits of the card, for card transactions. |
Deduplication
Overlapping extractions are normal: you re-run one because the first attempt used the wrong dates, a scheduled extraction covers a period you already pulled manually, or two colleagues extract the same quarter. Importing the same expense twice would create two expenses in VAT4U with double-counted VAT.
With Deduplicate expenses ticked (the default), each extraction leaves out expense lines whose Emburse ID was already written to an extraction file for this company. The finished row shows how many lines were written and an orange "N duplicate(s) skipped" tag when anything was left out. With the option off, the row says "Deduplication off".
Worth knowing: deduplication tracks what was extracted, not what was imported. If you extract a period and never import the file, those lines still count as extracted. To get them back, re-run the same extraction, or start a new one with the option switched off.
Running an extraction
You can run extractions in two ways:
On demand: click Start on-demand extraction, give the extraction a meaningful name (for example "Q1 2026 processed reports"), set the startDate and endDate, optionally set processed and includeDisapproved, and click Start extraction.
Scheduled: click Schedule periodic extractions and set:
an extraction name prefix, the date range is appended automatically;
the frequency: every month, quarter or year;
the day (1 to 28) on which the extraction runs. It covers the whole previous month, quarter or year;
the extraction period basis: processed date;
the optional processed and includeDisapproved filters;
Deduplicate expenses, ticked by default.
The panel shows the date of the next scheduled run. Use the dropdown next to it to cancel the schedule.
Extractions run in the background, so you can leave the page. The row moves through Processing to Finished, or Failed if Emburse could not be reached. Use Refresh to update the list, or Report → Running Jobs Report for a system-wide view.
On a finished row, More offers Download file to inspect the CSV yourself and Import file to start the import.
Importing data into VAT4U
On a finished extraction, open More → Import file. VAT4U creates an import from the extracted file and opens the import wizard with the data source already set to Emburse.
Map the Emburse fields to VAT4U fields. The saved mapping named "Emburse Default" is a good starting point, but we suggest you review it and adjust it to your own Emburse configuration, in particular the amount fields, the category mapping and any GL dimensions you want to keep.
For document mapping, select the
Document URLfield. VAT4U uses it to fetch the receipt image of each expense line from Emburse with your API credentials during the import. Receipts are attached automatically to the imported expenses.Complete the remaining wizard steps (entity, categories, validation) and start the import.
Limitation: Emburse has no country of expense field. The geographical information sits in the free-text Location field, which contains different levels of detail depending on what the traveller entered: sometimes a city, sometimes an area or province, sometimes a country. It cannot be used reliably as the Country field in VAT4U. We suggest importing the expenses with a default country in the wizard and then letting Smart AI read the country from the receipts after the import, correcting it where needed.
Summary
The Emburse connector pulls processed expense lines and their receipts through the Emburse Professional API, using an API key and secret generated by an Emburse administrator.
Extractions are scoped by the processed date of the expense report, run on demand or on a monthly, quarterly or yearly schedule, and skip lines already extracted for the company.
Import the extracted file with the "Emburse Default" mapping as a starting point, select
Document URLas the document source, and set a default country for the import because Emburse'sLocationfield is not a country field.