Use case · Expense approvals
High volume, low drama, fully evidenced.
Expense claims are the highest-frequency approval most companies run, and the one where the cost is entirely in friction: chasing receipts, querying cost centres, and rejecting claims over details that could have been asked about instead.
Free plan, no card required. Submitters are always free.
FIN-903
Tom B. · Sales
Expense claim — client dinner
- Category
- Client entertainment
- Amount
- $184.20
- Date incurred
- 29 Jul 2026
- Receipt
- receipt-2907.jpg — attached
- Attendees & cliententertainment category
- 3 internal, 2 from Northwind
The attendee list only appears for entertainment claims — the rule lives in the form, not in a policy PDF.
A spreadsheet, a folder of photos, and a monthly argument
Expenses fail differently from other approvals: not because the decision is hard, but because the information arrives in pieces, late, and in the wrong format.
Claims by spreadsheet and email
- Receipts arrive as phone photos in a chat thread, detached from the amounts.
- Finance rejects a claim for a missing cost centre; the whole thing gets resubmitted.
- Nobody knows which claims are still outstanding at month end.
- The approval is a reply saying “fine” — which is not an audit record.
Claims as structured requests
- Receipt, amount, date, and category captured together, in one submission.
- A missing detail becomes a question on the request, not a rejection.
- Bulk approve clears the routine ones; only exceptions get individual attention.
- Every reimbursement has a named approver and a timestamp behind it.
Cheap and routine goes fast. Unusual gets a second look.
The whole design goal is that finance spends their attention on the 5% of claims that warrant it.
Expense claim — execution
trigger
Claim submitted
Tom B. submits with the receipt attached from his phone.
condition
amount < $100
Routine claims auto-approve and notify finance for reconciliation.
approval:select-users
Line manager
Bulk approvable from the task queue alongside the week's other claims.
structured-qa
Question: which project?
Asked and resolved on the request — no rejection, no resubmission.
condition
category == entertainment
Categories with policy exposure get a finance review regardless of value.
approval:team
Finance
Reviews the exceptions only, with the full claim and receipt in view.
In a group chat
1 month
Claims batched to a month-end deadline, then queried, then resubmitted the following month.
On Requester
Same week
Submitted the day it's incurred, questions asked in-thread, routine claims bulk-approved.
Illustrative. The change isn't that anyone decides faster — it's that claims stop travelling in monthly batches, and a query stops costing a full cycle.
Ask, don’t reject
A rejected expense claim costs a full resubmission cycle and a small amount of goodwill. Structured Q&A turns “missing cost centre” into a question with an open and a resolved state, answered on the same request — which is why it exists.
A month end that isn’t a reconstruction exercise
Receipts attached to amounts
Not a folder of photos and a separate spreadsheet — one record carrying both, with presigned access.
Bulk clearance
Approve the routine backlog in one action from the task queue, and reserve real attention for exceptions.
Category and volume reporting
Spend by category and cost centre, cycle time, and which approver is the bottleneck.
Payment triggered downstream
Push the approved claim into payroll or accounts payable via the lifecycle webhook.
What this process leans on
Attachments from a phone
Capture the receipt where you are, finish the claim later from an autosaved draft.
Learn moreStructured Q&A
Resolvable questions directed at the submitter, so a detail doesn't cost a rejection.
Learn moreBulk approve & card queue
Built for the approval type where volume, not difficulty, is the problem.
Learn moreSmart pre-fill
The recurring monthly claim opens pre-filled with your last answers, badged and editable.
Learn moreOn expense approvals
- Does Requester actually pay the reimbursement?
- No. It owns the claim and the decision — what was spent, on what, who approved it, and when. Payment happens in your payroll or accounts payable system, which you can trigger from the approved event via webhook.
- How do we handle the high volume of small claims?
- Two ways. Route low-value claims to a single approver or auto-approve them under a threshold, and use bulk approve from the task queue to clear the routine backlog in one action rather than forty clicks.
- Can approvers ask a question without rejecting the claim?
- Yes, and this is the feature that matters most for expenses. Structured Q&A lets a reviewer ask a resolvable question — “which project was this for?” — directed at the submitter, with open and resolved states, instead of rejecting a claim over a missing detail.
- Can people submit a claim from their phone with a photo of the receipt?
- Yes. Attachment fields accept photos, Requester installs as a PWA, and drafts autosave — so a receipt can be captured at the restaurant and the claim finished later.
- How do we spot the same expense claimed twice?
- Request linking flags duplicates explicitly with a duplicates relation, and analytics show volume and pattern per submitter. It's a detection aid rather than an automated block — the judgement stays with a person.
Other processes teams start with
Purchase approvals
Spend requests routed by amount, approved with the numbers attached.
IT access requests
Tool and permission requests with an auditable grant history.
Time off & HR requests
Leave, equipment, and people requests that stop living in DMs.
Vendor onboarding
Collect vendor detail, route legal and finance sign-off, keep the file.
Client & external intake
A public link that turns outside requests into tracked work.
Get the receipt and the cost centre in the same submission.
Start from an expense claim template, set a threshold for auto-approval, and let bulk approve handle the rest. Everyone claiming is a free submitter.