Automating Expense Tracking : A smarter way to control corporate spending

Managing corporate expenses has always been a tedious task—manual approvals, scattered receipts, mismatched policies, cost leaks, delayed reimbursements, and unhappy employees. Furthermore, additional challenges on audit and reconciliation front. For CFOs and finance teams, this means heightened efforts, wasted time, inefficiencies, and potential compliance risks. TCAT changes that by automating expense management end-to-end, with fully integrated travel expense tracking at real time, giving companies the real control over traveller spending while improving employee experience. 

Travel vs Non-Travel Expenses 

Corporate expenses can broadly be divided into travel and non-travel categories, each with distinct challenges: 

Travel Expenses

• Include flights, hotels, taxis, mileage, visas, insurance and per diems. 
• Often involve multiple vendors, currencies, and approval layers. 
• High risk of missing receipts and policy violations due to last-minute bookings or out-of-pocket spending. 
• Travel expenses represent a major portion of corporate spending, second only to infrastructure and payroll.
• Policies vary based on the nature of travel, tenure of stay, job level and geographies. 

Non-Travel Expenses

• Include office supplies, subscriptions, software licenses, client entertainment, and utilities amongst others. 
• Usually, smaller amounts but more frequent and distributed across departments. 
• Harder to track manually, leading to duplicated entries or delayed reporting. 

Why Manual Expense Management Fails 

Traditional expense workflows rely heavily on spreadsheets, emails, and paper receipts. Common pain points include:

• Missing Receipts: Employees and travellers often misplace receipts, causing incomplete and delayed expense reporting. 

• Delayed approvals: Managers struggle to verify and approve expenses quickly. At times, expenses get incurred after pre-approvals and at times without approvals, necessitating post-facto approvals, which causes further complexity. 

• Policy violations: Employees may unknowingly incur and submit claims outside company policy, resulting in incorrect submissions, cost leaks and compliance issues. 

• Difficulties in Reconciliation: Reconciling advances drawn against expense reports is often messy. Without system-driven tracking, finance teams struggle to match advances with actual spend, close balances, or flag discrepancies—resulting in delays and inaccuracies. 

• Data inaccuracies and duplicate clams: Greater the manual processes, the higher the risk of duplication in expenses submitted & reimbursed. With out proper checks on expenses incurred against the organization policies, organizations may face fraud claims and cost leaks. 

• Limited visibility: Finance teams lack real-time insight into spending patterns. This further impacts the ability to exercise budgetary controls. 

• Disparate Systems Increase Complexity: Most companies run travel bookings, finance accounting, ERP, and payroll on separate systems resulting in inconsistent data, manual reconciliations, and limited unified view of spend. Lack of single source system results in finance teams stitching reports for analyzing spend. Lack of integration also increases processing times, errors and delays reimbursements. 

• GST credit loss: Employee-initiated procurement expenses often qualify for GST input credits, but without a proper system-driven process, receipts go missing, vendor GST details aren’t captured, and companies end up losing eligible credits leading to direct cost leakage.

These challenges not only slow operations but also increase costs and risk.

TCat’s Automated Expense T&E Solution 

TCat expense module automates the entire travel and expense lifecycle, from travel planning, cash advance requisition, on the go capture of bills, expense report submissions to reimbursement, with features designed for modern corporates:

• Smart Submission & Capture
  Employees can capture receipts digitally, and TCAT automatically extracts data using OCR. Expense entries are validated in real-time against company policies, ensuring compliance before submission. 
• Policy-Driven Automation
  Corporate travel and expense policies are enforced automatically, with flexible rules for different category of expenses. Based on the policies and rules, TCAT flags violations, applies caps, and calculate allowances without human intervention, reducing disputes and manual checks. 
• Flexible Allowance Rules
  TCAT supports a wide variety of allowance rules—per diem, distance-based, quantity-based, and lookup-based—ensuring that employee reimbursements are accurate and compliant with company policies, no matter the expense type or scenario. 
• Approval Workflow Automation
  Managers receive pre-validated expense reports with recommendations. The system allows multi-level approvals, automatic escalations, and audit trails—cutting approval cycles from days to minutes. 
• Cash Advances & Settlement Automation
  Employees can request cash advances for travel or other business expenses directly through TCAT. The system tracks advance utilization and automatically reconciles it during expense report submission. Settlements are streamlined, with TCAT calculating balances, flagging discrepancies, and triggering reimbursements seamlessly. 
• GST Input Credit Support TCAT gives administrators full control to define the tax-credit nature for every expense type, dictating exactly how employees must file those expenses and ensuring correct GST treatment. Information captured is made available via data exports and standard APIs, for downstream processing and reconciliation.
• Integrated Reimbursements TCAT seamlessly integrates with payroll and accounting systems, through standard APIs or file export/imports. Approved expenses trigger automatic reimbursements, minimizing delays and manual accounting work.
• Real-Time Analytics & Insights Finance teams gain dashboards that track spending trends, departmental budgets, and vendor costs. Actionable insights help identify cost-saving opportunities and forecast future expenses accurately.

Key Benefits 

• Time Savings: Reduce manual data entry and approvals. 

• Improved Accuracy: Automated validation reduces errors and policy breaches. 

• Improved Automation: With AI driven claim processing, mobile support, simple user interface and policy management, TCAT enable hassle free submissions of claims 

• Cost Control: Real-time monitoring prevents overspending and enforces compliance, and end to end tracking from cash advance till expense submissions. 

• Employee Satisfaction: Faster reimbursements and simplified submissions improve user experience. 

• Scalability: TCAT handles expense management across multiple teams, locations, and currencies. 

Key Benefits 

• Time Savings: Reduce manual data entry and approvals. 

• Improved Accuracy: Automated validation reduces errors and policy breaches. 

• Improved Automation: With AI driven claim processing, mobile support, simple user interface and policy management, TCAT enable hassle free submissions of claims 

• Cost Control: Real-time monitoring prevents overspending and enforces compliance, and end to end tracking from cash advance till expense submissions. 

• Employee Satisfaction: Faster reimbursements and simplified submissions improve user experience. 

• Scalability: TCAT handles expense management across multiple teams, locations, and currencies. 

Conclusion 

For growing organizations, manual expense management is a liability. Automating with TCAT transforms the process into a seamless, transparent, and data-driven workflow. Companies gain full control over corporate spending, finance teams save time, and employees enjoy a smoother, faster reimbursement experience. 

Automate your expense management with TCAT and turn spending from a headache into a strategic advantage.