Solutions / Expense classification

Receipt & expense classification

Receipts are read, coded to the right account and checked against your expense policy the moment they are uploaded — so the month-end pile is already sorted before anyone opens it.

Finance Document processing Professional services · E-commerce
5–15 sec
to code a receipt as it lands
Every line
coded, not just the total
Policy breaches
flagged at submission, not at close
Who it is for

Finance and accounting teams processing employee expenses, where the choice today is between coding hundreds of receipts by hand and trusting whatever the employee selected from the dropdown.

Short answer

A receipt is read, split into lines, coded to the right account and cost centre, VAT separated, and checked against your policy — in 5–15 seconds as it lands. Breaches surface while the employee is still submitting, rather than three weeks later at close.

The problem

Two hundred receipts arrive on the 30th, and every one of them needs a decision.

01

Employees code by guessing

The dropdown has forty categories and the person choosing has no reason to care which is right. Finance re-codes most of it later, which means the same receipt is handled twice.

02

Policy is checked after the money is spent

A breach found at close is an awkward conversation about something that happened a month ago. Found at submission, it is a note that costs nobody anything.

03

Photos of receipts are not data

A crumpled thermal receipt shot at an angle in a dim restaurant. Someone still has to read the total, the VAT, the date and the merchant off it, and someone is a person with better things to do.

How it works

From trigger to result, step by step.

01

Read whatever gets submitted

Photos, scans, PDFs, email confirmations, foreign-language receipts, and the ones printed on thermal paper that faded in a wallet. Merchant, date, total, tax and line items are extracted first.

02

Code to your chart of accounts

Your accounts, your cost centres, your project codes — not a generic taxonomy. Line-level where the receipt has lines, so a hotel bill separates room, meals and parking instead of landing in one bucket.

03

Handle tax properly

VAT rates split out per line, reclaimable and non-reclaimable separated, and receipts lacking the details needed to reclaim flagged at submission — when the employee can still ask for a proper invoice.

04

Check the policy at submission

Limits per category, missing receipts above the threshold, weekend and duplicate submissions, alcohol where policy excludes it. The employee sees it immediately, and finance sees only what actually needs a decision.

05

Post it, with the receipt attached

Coded entries flow into your accounting system with the image linked, so an auditor sees the document behind the entry without anyone going to look for it.

Before / after

What changes on the ground.

Today, by hand
×Employees pick a category at random from forty
×Finance re-codes hundreds of receipts by hand
×Policy breaches surface a month after the spend
×Reclaimable VAT is lost to receipts that lack the details
With the automation running
›Every receipt coded in 5–15 seconds on arrival
›Line-level coding against your chart of accounts
›Breaches flagged while the employee is still submitting
›VAT split correctly, with the document attached
What you get

Delivered, not demoed.

›Extraction from photos, scans, PDFs and email receipts in your languages
›Coding to your chart of accounts, cost centres and project codes
›Policy checks applied at the moment of submission
›Posting into your accounting system with the receipt image attached
›Documentation and a handover session — the system is yours
Built with

We build in your stack rather than moving you onto ours. The list below is what this solution most often connects to — other systems are a scoping question, not a blocker.

OCR LLM (replaceable) QuickBooks Xero 1C Expensify Google Drive PostgreSQL n8n
Time to production4–6 weeks
Build priceFixed quote
First stepFree mini-audit
Honest limits

When this is not the right solution.

·If your expense policy is unwritten, there is nothing to check against. Writing it down is part of the build, and some teams find that is the whole value.
·Thirty receipts a month is an hour of work. We will say so rather than build a system to save forty minutes.
·This does not approve expenses. It codes, checks and flags — approval stays a management decision, and we will not automate the part where someone takes responsibility.

Questions we get about this one

Good on most, and honest about the rest. A total it cannot read confidently is flagged for a person rather than guessed at, because a wrong number posted quietly is far more expensive than a receipt in a review queue. Confidence thresholds are set per field with your team.

Bring us the process that hurts.

The mini-audit is free: we take your version of this process apart and tell you plainly whether automating it pays. If it does, you get a scope and a fixed price.