We’re automating corporate card expense import for 15 legal entities across North America and Europe using OFC 22D. Our card processor provides daily transaction feeds with 5000-8000 transactions that need to be loaded into Fusion Expense Management and matched to employee expense reports.
I’m evaluating two primary approaches:
- REST API: Use expense REST endpoints to create credit card transactions programmatically
- FBDI: Use File-Based Data Import templates for bulk expense loading
Key requirements:
- Daily automated processing without manual intervention
- Transaction-level error reporting and reconciliation
- Support for multiple card programs and currencies
- Integration with expense policy validation
Both approaches seem viable but I’m unclear on the practical differences for bulk scenarios. What are the tradeoffs between REST API and FBDI for high-volume expense imports? How do you handle error scenarios and ensure reconciliation? Has anyone successfully implemented either approach at scale?
Consider your long-term operational model. FBDI requires file server infrastructure, monitoring of import jobs, and custom parsing of error reports. REST API requires more sophisticated middleware but gives you better observability and control. We built our card integration on REST API using Oracle Integration Cloud, and the operational dashboards and alerting are far superior to what we had with FBDI. The initial development was 3-4 weeks longer but worth it.
The timing concern with FBDI is valid - we need to complete processing within a 2-hour window each morning before employees start submitting expense reports. Can FBDI handle 8000 records reliably in that timeframe? Also, how does transaction matching work with FBDI versus REST API? We need to auto-match card transactions to expense report lines where possible.
We use FBDI exclusively for credit card imports. The main advantage is Oracle’s built-in validation and error reporting through the import process. You get detailed error logs identifying exactly which transactions failed and why. REST API would require you to build all that error handling yourself. For 5000-8000 daily transactions, FBDI is the obvious choice from a maintenance perspective.