SoftbooqTravel & Expense
Softbooq PlusReceipts in, reimbursements out, ledger already correct.
Photograph a receipt and the fields fill themselves. Approve a trip and it becomes a commitment in the accounts before a penny moves. Approve the claim and the posting, the budget check and the payment all follow without anyone opening Finance.
01
Capturing the spend
The receipt in a coat pocket is where expense management actually fails.
An inbox that reads the receipt
Photographed or emailed receipts are read and presented as filled fields to confirm, rather than as an image somebody transcribes at month end.
Likely duplicates flagged before they are claimed
The same receipt photographed and then forwarded is recognised as one expense, because paying a claim twice is discovered months later if at all.
Statutory per diem by destination
Full-day, partial-day and overnight rates held per destination with their own currency and source, applied by trip duration - not one flat allowance that is wrong in both directions.
Mileage at the right tier
Rates that step down after a threshold, applied against the distance already claimed this year. This is the part manual spreadsheets reliably get wrong.
Claims from people who are not employees
A public submission link lets a contractor, a candidate or a board member submit a claim with evidence, without being given a login.
02
Deciding on it
Approval should be quick where the claim is clean and slow only where it is not.
Policy violations scored on submission
A submitted report is checked against your policy and scored, so a reviewer sees what breaks the rules rather than reading every line to find out.
A compliance grade per report
The score with the reasons behind it, so approving an exception is a decision someone made rather than something that slipped through.
Bulk approve the clean ones
Clear a queue of compliant reports in one action and keep individual attention for the flagged ones.
Budget checked at approval, not after
A claim that would breach its cost-centre budget is stopped when it is approved, which is the only moment the answer can still change.
03
Into the books, and out to the bank
Where most expense tools hand you a CSV, this posts.
An approved trip is a commitment
Approving a trip commits its estimated cost against the budget before any money moves, so planned spend is visible rather than only in somebody's calendar. Nothing is posted to the accounts until the cost is real, and the commitment drops as soon as the trip's expenses are booked.
Approval posts the expense, payout posts the payment
Two separate events, posted separately, because the month you incurred the cost and the month you paid it back are often not the same month.
Reimbursements resolve the right account
The payable resolves through your chart rather than a hardcoded code, so the reimbursement credits exactly the account the accrual debited.
Paid in a bank run, once
Approved reimbursements join a payment run with the rest of your outgoings, with a guard against the same claim being paid twice.
Booking search inside the trip
Flights, hotels and cars searched from the trip record, so the itinerary and the spend belong to the same thing.
The details that took the longest
Small decisions you only make after getting them wrong.
Every one of these is a specific behaviour, chosen for a specific reason. They are the difference between software that demos well and software that survives a year of month-ends.
An approved trip counts against the budget before anyone spends
Approval commits the estimate against the budget, in your home currency. Without it, a quarter with forty approved trips and no bookings yet looks identical to a quarter with none, and the first sign of the difference is the credit card statement. The books change only when the cost is real, so a trip is never counted twice.
Incurring and reimbursing are separate postings
The expense posts on approval and the payment posts on payout. Collapsing them into one entry moves the cost into whichever month you happened to pay, which is how travel spend appears to spike in a month nobody travelled.
The reimbursement credits the account the accrual debited
The employee payable is resolved by role through your own chart of accounts rather than a hardcoded number. A hardcoded code is correct until a tenant uses a different chart, and then it is silently wrong.
Nothing is an island
What reaches Travel without anyone typing it again.
Every one of these is a real data path, not a promise of "full integration".
Before you ask
Questions people ask about Travel.
- Do I have to type in receipts?
- No. A photographed or emailed receipt is read automatically and the extracted fields are presented for confirmation.
- Does it handle per diem?
- Yes, with full-day, partial-day and overnight rates held per destination and applied by trip duration.
- Can non-employees claim?
- Yes, through a public submission link, without being given an account.
- What happens when a report is approved?
- The expense posts, the budget check runs, and the reimbursement becomes payable in a bank payment run.
- Is planned travel visible before it is spent?
- Yes. Approving a trip posts its estimate as a commitment, so approved-but-unspent travel appears in the accounts.
Where to look next.
All 18 modulesSee Travel with your own numbers in it.
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