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Expense Report Management Simplified: AI Capture, Validation & Categorization

Illustration of AI-powered expense report management: receipts, tickets, and a bank statement captured and reconciled automatically

The Problem

Expense report management has never been one tidy, self-contained task. It's more a pile of small actions that scatter everywhere and end up eating hours at month-end. A receipt photographed at a restaurant, then buried at the bottom of a phone. A toll ticket crumpled in a pocket. A fuel receipt sent by text, a hotel invoice landing by email. And then you have to gather it all, re-key the amounts into Excel, isolate the recoverable VAT, check for duplicates, tie each expense to the right client or project, and finally push everything into your accounting tool before reimbursing anyone.

Still spending hours on expense reports every month?

Sanso's AI collects, reads, and codes your receipts for you, right inside your existing tools.

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In a company of five to fifty people, this work almost always lands on the shoulders of the business owner or an already-overloaded office manager. And leaving it as is costs more than you'd think. Receipts that vanish. Colleagues you chase for days. VAT you never reclaim because there's no time to pull it out. Miscoded expenses that skew your profitability by project. And a monthly close that runs late, every single time.

The thankless part is that this work is invisible when it's done well. It only becomes visible the day a reimbursement drags on, or an audit turns up a gap. I'm Amalia Bercot, co-founder and CEO of Sanso, and this is exactly the burden we take off your plate.

Expense Report Management, Handled by Sanso's AI

Sanso is an AI-powered financial management service, not one more expense report app to learn and operate. No new platform to log into, no interface to get used to, no app to roll out across your team. Our AI does the work, and our human operators keep watch. Sanso simply plugs into what you already have: your accounting tool (Pennylane, for example), your bank or corporate card (Qonto, Revolut Business), your inbox, your Google Workspace. It all happens behind the scenes.

In practice, Sanso's AI takes over the entire expense report workflow. It collects receipts wherever they arrive, reads them, extracts the key information, isolates the VAT, discards duplicates, codes each expense to the right analytic axis, then matches it to the bank movement or card transaction it belongs to. No more documents to chase, no more amounts to re-key by hand, no more Excel to keep up to date. Structured data lands directly in your accounting tool, ready to use.

The idea fits in one sentence: your expense reports are collected, checked, and coded to the right place, without you having to deal with any of it.

Key Capabilities

Receipt Capture Across Every Channel

Expense report processing starts with the most tedious step: collecting the receipts. Sanso's AI handles that, wherever they show up. Your team members send a photo of a receipt to a dedicated WhatsApp channel, and the receipt imports itself. Receipts that arrive by email are captured the same way: the AI screens every message and every attachment, sorting the real receipts from everything else. And when an expense invoice only exists on an online portal (a software subscription, a transport service, an energy provider), an AI agent goes and fetches it. No more chasing your team for days to gather the month's documents.

AI Reading and Extraction

Once a receipt is captured, Sanso's AI reads it. Everything a classic OCR can do, it does too: character recognition, extraction of the amount, the VAT, the merchant, the date. Except it goes further. It understands exactly what the document is (a restaurant receipt, a hotel bill, a fuel receipt, a subscription) and adapts to any format or layout, including receipts written in a foreign language. Where a standard extraction tool sticks to the fields it was configured for, Sanso's AI handles just about any type of financial document and returns it as data you can use right away.

VAT Recovery and Duplicate Checks

On expense reports, two things get expensive when you forget them: the VAT you don't reclaim and the receipts counted twice. Sanso's AI isolates the VAT on every receipt, so you recover what you can instead of letting it slip away. It also spots duplicates right at capture and discards them, whether it's the same receipt sent through two channels or an expense already booked the month before. And the decisions that matter stay in your hands: if you want, you keep the final sign-off before reimbursement.

Contextual Analytic Categorization

Sanso's AI doesn't just sort your expenses into broad buckets. It grasps the context of each one. A trip to code to a specific client, a team meal to tie to a project, an expense to split across several engagements: the AI understands what it's dealing with and applies your company's own analytic coding, without anyone lifting a finger. For a consulting agency that rebills its expenses to clients, or a construction business owner who wants to track the profitability of each job site, this cost accounting finally becomes usable, with zero manual data entry.

What if you stopped chasing your team to gather receipts?

Sanso plugs into your tools in a few days and takes over the whole chain, from capture to bank reconciliation.

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Card and Bank Reconciliation

An expense report only makes full sense once it's tied to the payment behind it. For every expense paid by corporate card or reimbursed to an employee, Sanso's AI finds the matching bank movement in real time. That's what makes the whole thing genuinely reliable: knowing at any moment what was spent, by whom, and against which budget, never reimbursing the same expense twice, and having clean data for VAT recovery. All without a single manual check-off.

AI Supervised by Humans

Behind all of this is an AI that soaks up your company's context and learns how it works over the months. But on sensitive cases, it never plays solo. Our human operators supervise, handle exceptions, and settle the trickier situations. In practice, between 80% and 99% of the work is automated, for 100% reliability.

Who This Is For

Expense report management by Sanso is for French small and mid-sized businesses that don't have, or don't yet have, a dedicated, well-oiled finance function:

  • Business owners of 5-to-50-person companies who handle the team's expense reports themselves, or hand them off to someone without the right tools at their fingertips.
  • Consulting agencies whose staff travel a lot and rebill part of their expenses to clients, with costs to code to the right project.
  • Law firms juggling travel, entertainment, and case expenses that need tying to the right client.
  • Fast-growing startups that want a clear view of their spending without hiring a dedicated finance person right away.
  • Tradespeople and construction businesses that pile up fuel, materials, and toll receipts out in the field, with no process to handle them.

How It Works

  1. Onboarding. We plug into your existing tools: accounting, bank, corporate card, inbox, Google Workspace. A few days is all it takes, and your business runs as usual the whole time.
  2. Capture. Your teams send their receipts by WhatsApp or email, and Sanso's AI collects them automatically, across every channel.
  3. Reading and checks. Every receipt is read, its key information and VAT extracted, duplicates discarded, and consistency verified.
  4. Categorization and reconciliation. The expense is coded to the right analytic axis, sent to your accounting tool as structured data, then matched to the corresponding card transaction or bank movement.
  5. Your visibility. You find everything in your own tools, and you reach us by email or WhatsApp whenever the need arises.

Results You Can Expect

No more running after receipts. Sanso's AI collects, reads, and files them for you, without chasing anyone or re-keying a single amount. One of our clients used to spend four hours a week gathering documents. Today it's wrapped up in a few minutes.

VAT recovered properly. The AI isolates the VAT on every receipt, which keeps recoverable amounts from slipping away for lack of time.

Clean, up-to-date books. Your expense reports are categorized and matched to your payments continuously, for a reliable view of your spending and a close that no longer runs late.

Time given back to the business owner. Those hours swallowed by finance admin, you get them back for your real job, with peace of mind.

Get Started

If expense report management is eating your time, losing you VAT, or forcing you to chase your team every month, let's talk. In a few days, Sanso's AI plugs into your tools and takes over the whole chain, from capturing the receipt to bank reconciliation. And to see what it would really look like at your company, the simplest thing is to book a call with our team.

Free yourself from finance admin

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Frequently asked questions

What is expense report management?
Expense report management covers every step of processing employee out-of-pocket expenses: collecting the receipts, reading them, isolating the VAT, discarding duplicates, coding each expense to the right project, reimbursing it, and matching it to bank movements. At Sanso, an AI supervised by human operators handles this whole chain, directly inside your existing tools.
How do you automate expense report processing?
With Sanso, there's nothing to configure or run yourself. Sanso's AI collects receipts across every channel, reads them to extract the amount and the VAT, discards duplicates, codes each expense to the right analytic axis, then pushes the data into your accounting tool. It's a service that handles everything, not software you have to learn and operate.
Is Sanso an expense report software?
No. Sanso is an AI-powered service, not an expense report software you operate yourself, like N2F or Expensya. Rather than rolling out one more app across your team, Sanso's AI does the work for you and returns the results in your own tools, like Pennylane.
How do I send my expense receipts to Sanso?
A photo is the easiest way. Your team members send the receipt to a dedicated WhatsApp channel, and Sanso's AI imports it automatically. Receipts that arrive by email are captured the same way, and for invoices that only exist on an online portal, an AI agent goes and fetches them.
Does Sanso recover the VAT on expense reports?
Sanso's AI extracts the VAT from every receipt and delivers it in the structured data sent to your accounting tool. That gives you clean inputs to reclaim the deductible VAT instead of letting it slip away, which often happens when processing is done by hand and late.
How does Sanso prevent duplicates and errors?
Sanso's AI detects duplicates right at capture and discards them, whether the same receipt arrives through two channels or an expense has already been booked. It then matches each receipt to the corresponding bank movement or card transaction, which makes double reimbursement nearly impossible.
Does Sanso reconcile expense reports against the bank card?
Yes. For every expense paid by corporate card (Qonto, Revolut Business) or reimbursed to an employee, Sanso's AI finds the matching movement in real time and updates the status in your accounting tool. You know at any moment what was spent, by whom, and against which budget.
Does Sanso handle the cost accounting for my expenses?
Yes. Sanso's AI understands the context of each expense and assigns it to the right analytic axis: the right client, the right project, or the right cost center. For an agency that rebills its expenses or a business owner who tracks profitability by engagement, cost accounting for expense reports becomes usable without manual data entry.
Does Sanso replace my accountant?
No. Sanso does neither statutory accounting nor tax filings. The AI takes over expense report processing and day-to-day financial operations, so your accountant receives clean, complete data. The two roles complement each other; they don't step on each other's toes.
Is my data secure?
Yes. Sanso is GDPR-compliant and hosts data within the European Union. Since everything happens inside your existing tools, your data stays where it is, with controlled, traceable access. Sanso is also CASA-certified by Google for access to Google Workspace data.
How much does expense report management with Sanso cost?
Sanso works on a monthly flat rate, calibrated to your volume of operations, with no per-transaction billing and no per-user pricing. Plans range from $300 to $2,000 per month, with no commitment.

Free yourself from finance admin

Book a call