Capturing an expense
1
Photograph the receipt
From the portal or the mobile app.
2
OCR reads it
Claude extracts the merchant, date, amount, currency and VAT from the image. The extraction is a
draft: it is shown to the employee to confirm or correct, never submitted silently.
3
Categorise
Swiss expense categories, with per-diem rates where they apply — meals, accommodation, mileage.
4
Add to a report
Individual items are grouped into a report for a trip, a month, or a project.
Currencies
Items can be in any currency; each is converted to CHF at the applicable rate, and both the original and the converted amount are kept. An expense in EUR stays visibly an expense in EUR while reporting and reimbursement work in CHF.Policy
Categories carry a code (MEALS, TRAVEL, ACCOMMODATION, …), an optional per-item
policy limit, and whether a receipt is required at all.
An expense policy sets the numbers, with defaults matching Swiss practice:
Per-category rules refine the policy where one category needs different treatment.
Two-level approval
A report moves through an explicit status chain:
The manager asks whether the expense was incurred for the work and is reasonable;
finance asks whether it is correctly categorised, within policy, and within budget.
A rejection always carries a reason — the common case is a missing receipt, not a
disputed expense.
Budget integration
An approved report deducts from the relevant department budget automatically, so budget holders see committed spend as it happens rather than at period close. See Budgeting.Reimbursement
Approved expenses are reimbursed through payroll: they become a Lohnart on the next run. Expense reimbursements are generally not salary and route through Lohnarten that are outside the AHV base — which is a master-data configuration, not a per-report decision. On installations syncing with bexio, reimbursements flow there instead.Receipts and retention
Receipt images are stored in Azure Blob Storage alongside the expense item. Swiss retention rules for accounting documents apply, so receipts outlive the employment relationship and are not removed by an employee deletion.OCR is an assistance feature. The employee confirms what was extracted and the approvers see the
original image next to the figures — the model’s reading is never the sole record. See AI
transparency.
Turning it off
FEATURE_EXPENSES=false.