Expense Management for Cards and Reimbursements

Employee spend starts in different places. One employee swipes a company card, another pays out of pocket, and another submits mileage or per diem after a trip. Finance needs the same thing from all of it: complete details, policy context, correct coding, and a clean handoff to posting or payroll. Today, Stampli is expanding expense management to bring both spend paths into one finance-ready workflow.

Why Employee Spend Stays Fragmented

Most expense processes were never designed as one workflow. Card transactions live in one portal, receipts arrive by email or text, reimbursement requests sit in spreadsheets, approvals happen in another thread, and payroll gets a manual handoff at the end. Finance is left stitching the picture together after the money has already moved. Along the way, teams run into the same problems:

• Receipt chasing: Finance follows up on missing, unreadable, or mismatched receipts long after the purchase happened.
• Spreadsheet reimbursements: Out-of-pocket, mileage, and per diem requests move through email chains and manual forms with no consistent review.
• Coding cleanup: Employees guess at categories, so finance corrects general ledger (GL) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) coding late in the process.
• Approvals without context: Managers approve expenses without the receipt, the policy, or the history in front of them.
• Payroll prep: Approved reimbursements still need someone to assemble amounts, employee details, and documentation before payroll can act.

When employee spend lives outside the finance workflow that governs the rest of company spend, every one of those steps becomes cleanup work. That is how receipts get lost, coding drifts, and month-end reconciliation drags.

The Foundation Was Already in Place

Stampli already supports expenses for Stampli-issued cards, connected to the same Procure-to-Pay platform that handles procurement, accounts payable, vendor management, and payments. Card spend was already reaching finance with receipts, coding, approvals, and audit history attached.

What was missing was the other spend path: the expenses employees pay for themselves. The purchases made on personal cards, the miles driven between job sites, and the per diem days on a business trip. That spend still moved through spreadsheets and email while everything else moved through Stampli.

Introducing Stampli Expense Management

Stampli Expense Management brings company-card expenses and employee-paid reimbursements into one finance-ready workflow. Employees get a simple way to submit expenses. Finance gets the context needed to review, approve, code, reimburse, post, and audit every expense.

“Employees just want to get paid back without the paperwork, and finance just wants the full story. Stampli Expense Management gives both: card expenses and reimbursements in one connected workflow.”

Kai Beilin, Sr. Product Manager at Stampli

The architecture is simple: two spend paths, one finance workflow. Expenses handles company-card spend after the swipe. Reimbursements handles employee-paid spend before reimbursement money moves. Both paths run through the same policy review, approval routing, AP Review, ERP-aligned coding, and audit trail.

New Reimbursement Workflows for Employee Spend

Reimbursements are new to Stampli, and they cover the three ways employees most often pay out of pocket:

• Out-of-pocket purchases: Employees upload receipts and Stampli creates a reimbursement request for each one.
• Mileage: Employees enter a start and end point for calculated mileage, or enter miles directly, using rates finance configures.
• Per diem: Employees select trip dates and mark full days, half days, or excluded days against configured rates.

Approved requests move to Payroll Operations, a new workspace where payroll specialists select reimbursements and export a configurable file for payroll processing. Payment is handled through your payroll process outside Stampli, so human review stays in control of every dollar before it moves.

A Refreshed Company Card Expense Experience

Card expenses get a redesign built around what cardholders actually need to know: what requires action and what is already moving. The new My Expenses workspace separates the two into To Do and To Track, so nothing sits in limbo.

Submitting receipts gets easier too. Employees can capture receipts from desktop, mobile, SMS, and bulk upload, and connected inbox context can help find receipt attachments where enabled. Expense Cards stay connected to the same workflow, and Stampli handles the messy real-world cases: pending amounts that change at settlement, tips that post separately, and duplicate or unreadable receipts that need review. A redesigned mobile experience for expenses and reimbursements lets employees submit, track, and approve from their phones, including offline.

AI-Assisted Review That Keeps Finance in Control

Stampli AI is embedded across the workflow, preparing every expense for review rather than replacing it. Stampli AI helps:

• Extract receipt details and complete expense fields.
• Suggest coding based on categories, ERP context, and historical patterns.
• Flag missing information, duplicates, policy issues, and receipt mismatches.
• Surface the relevant policy language when a flag is raised.

Smart Policy makes that last part possible. Admins upload company policy documents, Stampli turns them into structured, editable guidance, and reviewers see policy context right where decisions happen. Employees see what needs attention before they submit, instead of finding out from finance a week later. Suggestions stay reviewable, and finance keeps control of every final decision.

One Workflow for Every Employee Expense

Employee spend should not require a separate system, a separate spreadsheet, and a separate cleanup cycle. With Stampli Expense Management, every employee expense gets a moment of reflection with the full context finance needs: the receipt, the policy, the coding, the approvals, and the audit trail, all connected to the platform your team already relies on.

Explore Stampli Expense Management