Expense management automation, from receipt to approved claim

Capturing receipts wherever they come from

Receipts arrive in every possible form: a photo of a crumpled paper slip, a PDF confirmation, an email receipt from a booking site, a line on a card statement. The friction of expenses starts here, with someone having to gather and transcribe all of it. We automate capture from the channels your people actually use, a forwarded email, an uploaded photo, a shared inbox, and turn each one into structured data ready for the rest of the process.

An LLM reads each receipt the way a person would, pulling out the merchant, date, amount, tax, and category hints, even from a blurry photo or a receipt in another language. The extracted data is then validated, amount against any card-statement line, tax recomputed, date sanity-checked, so what flows downstream is clean. Where a receipt is unreadable or a field is uncertain, it is flagged for the employee to confirm rather than guessed at.

• Capture from forwarded emails, uploaded photos, or a shared inbox
• Extract merchant, date, amount, tax, and category from any receipt format
• Validate against card-statement lines where those exist
• Flag unreadable or uncertain receipts for the employee to confirm

Categorisation and policy checks that do the tedious reading

Coding an expense to the right account and cost centre is repetitive knowledge work: this is travel, that is client entertainment, this one belongs to the marketing budget. We automate categorisation using your chart of accounts and your own historical coding, so the suggestions reflect how your business actually books things rather than a generic template. Over time the automation learns your patterns, and the routine claims code themselves.

Policy is the other half. Your expense rules, per-diem limits, categories that need a reason, spend that needs pre-approval, are exactly the kind of consistent checking software does well and tired humans do poorly at month-end. The automation applies those rules to every claim, flags the ones that breach or approach a limit, and lets the compliant majority flow through. It does not decide to punish anyone; it surfaces the exceptions clearly so a manager can make the call with the full picture.

• Categorise against your chart of accounts and historical coding, not a generic template
• Apply your expense policy consistently: limits, required reasons, pre-approval rules
• Flag out-of-policy or borderline claims for a manager, pass the compliant ones through
• Learn your coding patterns over time so routine claims need less touching

Approvals stay human, and routing makes them fast

Approving an expense is a judgement about whether the spend was reasonable and legitimate, and that stays with a person. What we automate is everything around it: routing each claim to the right approver based on your rules, presenting a clean summary with the receipt, category, and any policy flags attached, and chasing approvals that stall so nothing sits for weeks. The approver spends a few seconds on a well-prepared claim instead of hunting for context.

The line between automatic and human is one you set. Small, in-policy, routine claims from a trusted category can be posted with a light touch, while anything above a threshold, out of policy, or unusual is held for explicit approval. We make those thresholds explicit and easy to change as your confidence grows, so you are never surprised by what went through on its own, and never bottlenecked by approvals that did not need a human.

Clean posting, an audit trail, and no lock-in

Once approved, a claim is posted to your accounting system with the right coding, the receipt attached, and a full record of what happened: who submitted it, what the automation extracted and checked, which policy flags fired, and who approved it. That audit trail matters for expenses as much as anywhere in finance, because expense fraud and honest mistakes both hide in processes nobody can reconstruct. Here, every claim is traceable end to end.

The whole build runs on your infrastructure and connects to the expense and accounting tools you already use, and you own it outright: workflows, code, documentation, credentials. We are not adding another subscription you cannot leave. And we stay in our lane, we build the capture, categorisation, and routing, while the judgement on borderline claims and any tax treatment of expenses stays with your finance team and their advisers.