AI agent · Finance & accounting · Review against rules
Expense report audit
The software reads every receipt, checks each expense line against your policy and looks across reports for the same receipt claimed twice. Employees fix simple issues themselves; finance reviews only the breaches, with the evidence and the policy clause side by side.
Typical volumes for this process, not a client figure.
Managers approve totals at a glance; finance checks a sample of reports.
Every line checked against receipt and policy; only breaches and doubtful receipts reach finance.
Where the time goes today
Employees submit expense reports through an expense tool: lines, categories, amounts and photographed receipts. The manager approves, often by checking the total and confirming that the trip took place. Finance then audits a sample, or reports above a value, checking receipts against the policy: hotel limits by city, class of travel, meals and alcohol, attendee lists for client entertainment, and receipts that carry the details you need to reclaim tax.
Many breaches are small and honest: the wrong category, a card slip instead of an itemised receipt, a minibar charge. A few are not: the same receipt submitted in two months, a personal expense in a business trip, mileage longer than the route. Sampling rarely catches the second kind, because a pattern only shows when you look across many reports from the same person.
The review itself is slow. Reviewers open each image, compare it with the line, chase employees for missing receipts and apply a policy full of exceptions by grade, location and project. Two reviewers often reach different answers on the same report, and reclaimable tax is lost when receipts lack the required detail.
How the agent works
- Read each receiptThe agent extracts merchant, date, amount, currency, tax and, where itemised, the items. It checks that the receipt supports the line: same amount, plausible date, matching category.
- Apply the policyEach line is checked against the limits for the location, grade and category, travel class rules, pre-approvals, attendee requirements and the trip dates held in your travel booking data.
- Look across reportsIt checks for the same receipt submitted twice, in any report, by image or by merchant, amount and date. It also compares claims with corporate card transactions and mileage with the route distance.
- Write the findingsEach issue is written as one sentence citing the policy clause and the evidence. It is labelled as an employee fix, a finance decision or an integrity concern.
- Route and returnReports with no findings proceed to payment. Employee fixes go back with the exact request; finance decisions and integrity concerns go to the right reviewer.
What stays with a person
Finance decides whether to accept a breach, approve an exception or reduce a reimbursement. The agent never rejects a claim outright: it returns it for correction or refers it. Where the policy is ambiguous, the reviewer's interpretation is recorded and applied consistently afterwards.
Integrity concerns go only to a designated reviewer, with restricted visibility, and are handled under your internal process. The agent does not raise them with the employee or the manager. A duplicate receipt is a pattern worth a look, not a finding, and the difference matters to the person involved.
What it reads, what it produces
| It reads | It produces |
|---|---|
| Expense reports and receipt images | Findings per report, each citing the policy clause and the evidence |
| Your expense policy, with limits by location, grade and category | Correction requests returned to employees |
| Corporate card transactions | A reviewer queue ordered by value and type |
| Travel booking data | Duplicate and overlap flags |
| HR data: grade, cost centre, manager | A monthly summary of findings by type and cost centre |
Controls that come with it
- The agent returns or refers; it never rejects a claim or reduces a payment.
- Integrity flags are visible only to named reviewers.
- Each month, finance reviews a random sample of reports that passed with no findings, to measure what the agent misses.
- Each finding records the policy version applied; a policy change is tested on past reports before it goes live.
- A materiality threshold, set by you, stops trivial breaches from filling the reviewer queue.
How you know it works
- Share of reports fully checked
- Findings per hundred reports, by type
- Findings dismissed by reviewers as not a breach
- Time from submission to reimbursement
- Receipts missing the details needed to reclaim tax
Is your process ready?
- Written rules: the policy has numeric limits and named exceptions. If it says 'reasonable' throughout, the agent will flag everything or nothing.
- Systems: the expense tool exposes reports and receipt images, and the card feed can be read.
- Cheap check: a reviewer sees the receipt and the clause side by side and decides in seconds.
- Volume: thousands of reports a month, where full review by people is not affordable.
- Same description: finance teams in every office apply the same exceptions in the same way.
The five candidacy checks are explained, with an exam, in the free Module 01.
What goes wrong
- Exceptions approved by email and never recorded, so legitimate spending is flagged.
- Receipts in many languages and currencies, needing the exchange rate for the transaction date.
- Flags worded like accusations, which damages trust in the whole process.
- Shared taxis and split bills triggering duplicate flags across colleagues.
Questions we get
Will employees feel they are being treated as suspects?
That depends on how findings are worded and who sees them. Many findings are ordinary corrections, returned to the employee as a specific request: 'the hotel receipt is a card slip; please add the itemised bill'. Integrity concerns go only to a named reviewer and are never communicated by the agent. Checking every report also means nobody is singled out for a sample.
Can it detect altered receipts?
It can detect some signs: the same image used twice, a total that does not match the itemised lines, a date that falls outside the trip, a merchant in a city the traveller was not in. It cannot prove a receipt was altered. Those signs are passed to a reviewer as reasons to look, with the evidence attached, not as a conclusion.
Our policy varies by country and grade. Can it cope?
Yes, provided the variations are written down. The agent applies the rule set that matches the employee's grade, the location of the expense and the date, and cites the clause it used. Variations that exist only in reviewers' habits have to be written into the policy first, or the agent will flag spending that your team routinely accepts.
Does it replace manager approval?
No. The manager confirms that the trip and the spending served a business purpose, which the agent cannot know. The agent checks compliance with the policy and the evidence behind each line. Managers can see the agent's findings before they approve, so their approval rests on more than a glance at the total.
Want this agent on your process?
Tell us about your version of this process — volumes, systems, what goes wrong. A person answers with an approach and a price, usually within two working days, or tells you it is the wrong project.