Hi everyone, I’m new here and hoping for some advice. I’ve recently been tasked with helping our small team improve our expense reporting process, and one of the biggest headaches we’re running into is receipt quality. 😅
We’re using a popular cloud-based expense tool, and the policy is simple: employees snap a photo of their receipt with their phone and upload it through the mobile app. The problem is, maybe half of the receipts come through completely unreadable—blurry, too dark, cut-off corners, or even sideways. Our accountant then has to spend way too much time chasing people for better copies, which delays everything and creates a lot of friction.
I’m coming from a data engineering background (more comfortable with SQL and Python than finance workflows!), so my first thought was: shouldn’t the app itself prevent this? I was expecting some kind of real-time validation, like those banking apps that check if a check is fully in frame and legible before you proceed. But our tool doesn’t seem to do that, or if it does, it’s not working.
So my questions for the community are:
- Is this a common problem with all expense tools, or have we just chosen one with weak validation?
- For those of you who have solved this, was it a matter of switching to a different tool, or did you implement some kind of internal training or policy that actually worked?
- I’m also curious if any open-source or more configurable tools exist in this space. I’d be willing to look at something we could tailor a bit more, maybe even build a simple pre-submission check using a vision API if that’s what it takes.
I really want to fix this at the source rather than just complaining about it. Any guidance on what has worked for your teams would be so appreciated.