Expense claims people will actually submit (and managers will approve)

We’ve seen expense policies that read like legal contracts. Then we looked at the inbox: receipts on WhatsApp, “I’ll send it later,” and managers approving things they barely scanned.

You don’t need a stricter PDF. You need fewer rules, clearer owners, and a path that takes under two minutes on a phone.

Write rules people can remember

Keep the public policy to one page. Categories, limits, what’s never reimbursable, and how fast you’ll pay. Everything else belongs in an internal FAQ.

Pick round numbers. “Meals up to €35” sticks. “Meals up to €34.50 excluding VAT on weekdays” does not.

Say what happens when something is missing. No receipt above €25? Rejected. That’s kinder than letting a claim sit for three weeks.

Make submission boringly easy

Photo of receipt, amount, category, project or cost center if you use them. That’s enough for most claims. Extra fields are where good intentions die.

Let people submit from the trip, not from their kitchen table on Sunday. If the only way in is a desktop form, you’ll get batches, and batching is where details get invented.

Approvals that don’t become theater

One approver for normal amounts. A second only above a real threshold. Two people reviewing a €12 coffee is how you teach everyone to ignore the process.

Give managers a weekly digest, not twelve pings a day. And show them the receipt next to the amount, half of “I thought it looked fine” disappears when the photo is right there.

Close the loop with finance

Export or sync by cost center on a fixed day. Ambiguity about “when will I get paid?” creates more Slack noise than almost anything else in ops.

WerkIQ Expense Claim is meant for this flow: capture, approve, reimburse, without building a second process in email. If your team still forwards PDFs around, start there before you rewrite the policy again.