Expense Management: Designing a Process People Will Actually Follow

Expense management sits at an awkward intersection: finance wants control and auditability, employees want to submit a receipt and move on. Most expense processes fail one group or the other. Usually both.

This course looks at expense workflow design from both sides. It covers how to write a policy that is specific enough to be enforceable without being so detailed that no one reads it, how to choose between available tools based on your actual transaction volume and team structure, and how to build an approval process that does not create a backlog every time a manager is travelling.

The compliance gap

In most organisations, expense non-compliance is not deliberate. It is a product of unclear policy, inconvenient submission processes, and approval delays that make the whole thing feel pointless. Fixing the process reduces non-compliance more reliably than adding enforcement.

FBP teams that have gone through this program typically find that their largest compliance problems trace back to 2 or 3 specific policy ambiguities rather than widespread bad behaviour.

Module 2 includes a policy language audit - a set of 17 questions that identify where your current expense policy is creating unintentional grey areas.