Lucia Gomes, Product Marketing Manager at Stampli, opened our customer session on Stampli Expense Management with a question that sounds simple: expense management has three steps, right? Someone spends money, someone approves it, and finance handles the rest.
Then she asked what “the rest” actually includes.
That is where the real work shows up. Receipts have to be collected, matched to the right transaction, and checked for missing details. Spend has to be reviewed against policy. Coding has to be corrected before it reaches the ERP or payroll. Approvals need follow-up. Exceptions need someone with enough context to make a judgment call.
From a distance, expense management looks straightforward. Inside finance, it can become a pile of small handoffs that all have to be cleaned up before close.
Here’s a recap of what we showed our customers in the Expense Management session.
Two spend paths, one workflow
Employee spend usually reaches finance in two ways.
The first is company card spend through Stampli Card. The second is money employees pay out of pocket, including purchases, mileage, and per diem.
Finance needs the same basic information in either case: complete details, policy context, correct coding, the right approvals, and a clean handoff to the ERP or payroll. The trouble is that those two spend paths have usually lived apart. Card transactions sit in one system. Reimbursements get pieced together from spreadsheets, email threads, and late employee submissions. By the time finance sees the full picture, the money has already moved.
Stampli Expense Management brings both paths into the same review, approval, and AP Review flow used across Stampli’s procure to pay platform. Stampli Intelligence helps prepare the expense in between, so employees and finance teams are not starting from a blank form every time.
What we walked through
The session focused on five places where expense work tends to slow down: receipts, policy review, coding, routing, and reimbursements.
Getting receipts in faster
Getting a receipt back from an employee is only the first step. Finance still has to match it to the right transaction, check whether anything is missing, and confirm that the details are usable.
Stampli now gives employees more ways to get receipts into the system. They can upload from a desktop, take a photo from a phone, text in a receipt, or submit a batch at once. If an admin enables the option, Stampli can also pull attachments directly from a connected Gmail or Outlook inbox.
From there, Stampli AI reads the receipt, fills in what it can, suggests coding, matches it to the transaction, and flags anything that looks off.
For example, with a customer dinner, an employee takes a photo on the way out of the restaurant. By the time they open the expense, the receipt is already matched and a category is waiting. They are not building an expense report from scratch. They are reviewing what Stampli already prepared.
Smart Policy in the review
Reviewers see flags all day. A flag with no context does not help much. It just adds another line to the queue.
Smart Policy starts with the company’s actual policy documents. Admins upload the policies, and Stampli turns them into structured guidance that can appear directly inside the review. When something is flagged, the reviewer sees what triggered it, which policy it came from, and what to consider before deciding.
The demo example was a hotel bill over the standard nightly rate. On its face, that might look like a violation. But the hotel was the designated conference hotel, which is exactly the kind of exception a blanket rule can mishandle.
With Smart Policy, the reviewer gets the policy language and the reason for the flag in the same place they are reviewing the expense. Nothing is automatically rejected. The reviewer still makes the call, and the exception remains in the audit trail.
Categories for employees, GL control for finance
Employees should not have to learn the chart of accounts to submit an expense. Finance also cannot give up coding control just to make the front end easier.
That is why Stampli separates the employee experience from the finance coding structure.
Employees choose categories they recognize, such as Travel or Lodging. Behind the scenes, finance still manages GL accounts, ERP items, departments, subsidiaries, and any other configured fields that need to be controlled.
Stampli Intelligence uses the employee-facing category to suggest coding. From there, finance can decide how tightly to manage the process. Some teams may use strict mapping rules. Some may require AP Review. Some may use both. Finance confirms coding during AP Review, and employees never have to see the chart of accounts.
Routing that fits the expense
A team lunch, a hotel bill, and a mileage reimbursement do not need the same review path.
Stampli workflows can route expenses based on card expense versus reimbursement, amount, department or user properties, org hierarchy, configured fields, and fallback conditions. AP Review can follow the same kind of logic.
That gives finance a few options. Require AP Review for every expense. Require it only when finance needs to touch the item. Or trigger it when there is an exception, a missing required field, or some other reason to take a closer look.
The point is not to add more routing. It is to stop treating every expense like it carries the same risk.
Reimbursements
Reimbursements cover three types of employee-paid spend: purchases, mileage, and per diem.
Purchases are the standard out-of-pocket expenses employees submit for repayment. Mileage can be calculated from a start and end point or entered directly, using the rates your organization has configured. Per diem runs off trip dates and your configured rates for full days, half days, and excluded days.
The workflow is the same one card expenses already use. The employee submits the reimbursement with help from Stampli Intelligence. The request moves through policy checks, approvals, and AP Review. What comes out is payroll-ready, with journal entries posted to your ERP.
Stampli Card and Reimbursements are independent products. Customers can use Stampli Card on its own, Reimbursements on its own, or both together.
The employee experience
My Expenses is a new workspace split into two lists: To Do and To Track.
To Do shows anything waiting on the employee. That might mean adding a receipt, choosing a category, filling in a required field, or responding to a policy flag.
To Track shows expenses and reimbursements that have already been submitted and are moving through approval or finance review.
The mobile experience uses the same split, which matters because expense work rarely happens at a desk. Receipts happen in restaurants, airports, hotels, rideshares, and job sites. Employees can capture, complete, and track card expenses from the phone. With Reimbursements, they can also submit out-of-pocket purchases, mileage, and per diem from mobile. Reviewers can approve and check status from the app as well.
What actually changes
The card foundation does not change. Physical and virtual cards, card requests and approvals, spending limits, card controls, and card activity all continue to work as before.
The bigger change is what happens after spend lands in the system. A receipt can come in from more places and get matched sooner. A policy flag can carry the actual policy context with it. An employee can pick a familiar category while finance still controls the GL coding. An approval path can depend on the type of spend, the amount, the department, or the presence of an exception. And with Reimbursements, out-of-pocket spend can move through the same review structure as card expenses.
For AP and finance leaders, this is a practical change: fewer disconnected steps around receipts, coding, policy review, approvals, and reimbursement preparation. The review process and audit trail stay where finance already works.
See how card expenses and reimbursements work together in Stampli Expense Management.
