Hi everyone, I’m relatively new to the community and have been reading a lot of threads here while evaluating expense management tools for my company. We’re a mid-sized tech services firm with about 150 employees, and our current process is entirely manual—emailing spreadsheets and PDFs, which then get approved in Slack. It’s become a real time sink for our finance team.
We’ve been looking at dedicated platforms like Ramp and Expensify, but the pricing models and certain feature constraints have me wondering about a more custom approach. Specifically, I’ve been exploring the idea of using Make (formerly Integromat) to build our own workflow. We already use it for some marketing and data sync automations, so the team has some familiarity with it.
My thought was to create a scenario that handles the core flow: receipt submission (via a form or email parsing), routing for approval based on department and amount, and then pushing the approved data into NetSuite for reimbursement and reporting. I’m hesitant, though, because building something mission-critical for finance feels different from other automations. I’m worried about gaps I might not see.
I’d love to hear from anyone who has attempted this, either fully or partially. My main questions are:
* **Reliability & Audit Trail:** How did you ensure every step was logged and traceable? Did you build a parallel logging system, or does Make’s operation history suffice for compliance?
* **Error Handling:** What did you do for failed scenarios? For example, if a receipt image can’t be parsed, or if an approver is out of office and doesn’t respond within a set period?
* **Accounting Sync:** How robust was the integration with your accounting system (especially NetSuite)? Were there issues with data formatting, duplicate submissions, or sync delays?
* **TCO vs. Commercial Tools:** While the initial build seems cost-effective, I’m concerned about hidden costs. Did you find the ongoing maintenance, scenario updates, and support burden outweighed the subscription savings?
Some specific hurdles I’m already anticipating:
* Building a multi-level approval matrix that can handle overrides.
* Managing receipt storage securely (linking to something like S3).
* Creating a user-friendly “pending approvals” page for managers without them needing to log into Make.
I’m genuinely curious if this is a viable path or if it’s a classic case of “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.” The flexibility is appealing, but I don’t want to create a fragile system that becomes a single point of failure for our finance operations. Any insights from your experiences, especially lessons learned or things you wish you’d known before starting, would be incredibly helpful for my evaluation.