Client Paid $4,200 in Duplicate Expense Reimbursements First Year 🔥

Growing company. 450 expense receipts monthly. Manual processing by accounting team. Duplicate submissions happening. Policy enforcement inconsistent. Approval routing chaotic.

Built automated expense tracker with duplicate detection and policy validation.

THE CLIENT'S SITUATION:

Finance team handling receipts via email inbox. Each receipt requiring manual extraction of merchant, date, amount. Entry into spreadsheet. Policy checking against limits. Approval routing determination. 15 minutes per receipt average.

Critical problem: No duplicate detection system. Same receipt submitted multiple times gets processed multiple times. Discovery happens during monthly reconciliation. Requesting refunds from employees creates awkward situations.

Year one audit revealed 37 duplicate reimbursements totaling $4,200. Same expense paid twice, sometimes three times. No systematic prevention.

Policy compliance suffering. Meal expense limit: $50. One clerk approves $75 receipt. Different clerk flags identical amount as violation. Employees receiving inconsistent messages about company policy.

THE AUTOMATION WORKFLOW:

13-node system using Gmail monitoring, PDF Vector document extraction, duplicate detection, policy validation, approval routing, Google Sheets database, Slack notifications, and accounting email summaries.

Gmail trigger watches for "Receipt" or "Expense" emails. Downloads PDF attachments automatically.

PDF Vector extracts complete receipt data - merchant, date, line items, subtotal, tax, total.

Duplicate detection fingerprints each receipt. Merchant plus date plus total creates unique ID. Checks against historical database. Prevents reprocessing.

Policy validation assigns categories based on merchant. Meals $50 limit, lodging $200, transportation $100, office $500, other $100. Compliance checked automatically.

Approval routing based on expense amount regardless of category. Under $100 auto-approved with Slack notification only. $100-$500 routes to Tier 1 manager approval request. $500-$1,000 routes to Tier 2 senior manager. Over $1,000 requires executive approval. Appropriate person notified via Slack automatically.

Google Sheets integration logs every expense. Merchant, date, category, total, compliance status, approval tier, duplicate flag all tracked. Searchable database created.

Accounting team receives email summary for each processed expense. Complete line item breakdown when available. Policy compliance noted. Approval routing documented.

CLIENT RESULTS:

12 months. 5,400 receipts processed automatically.

Processing time: 112 hours monthly eliminated completely

Duplicate reimbursements: $4,200 prevented (37 caught)

Policy compliance: 100% consistent enforcement

Approval efficiency: instant tier routing

Employee satisfaction: faster reimbursement turnaround

Setup: $3,600 one-time. Monthly: $540.

ROI: 3 months payback from duplicate prevention alone.

Templates: n8n | Make | Zapier

What percentage of your expense reimbursements are duplicate submissions?

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