Travel, advances and claims on one policy engine
Multi-leg trip requests, advances that post to the ledger, claims priced by a versioned policy instead of a typed-in rate, corporate-card reconciliation and a T&E cockpit — the enterprise travel module, in the Cloud edition.
Policy is the only rate store
The Policy Studio holds three masters in one place: claimable categories, versioned policies, and the rule lines those policies carry — per-diem, mileage, category, daily, hotel and meal limits, receipt thresholds and advance caps. Policies are scoped by organisation, grade, department, location or travel type, and when several lines match a rule the most restrictive limit wins. There are no rates hard-coded anywhere in the product.
Request the trip, then fund it
A travel request carries a multi-leg itinerary — from and to city, mode, dates, one-way or return — through draft, pending approval, approved, booked, in progress and completed, with bookings and linked advances on the same drawer. Advances run approve → disburse → recover: disbursement posts Dr Employee Advances / Cr Bank, an unspent recovery reverses it, and the outstanding book is aged into 0–30, 31–60, 61–90 and 90+ day buckets. Creating an advance runs the policy’s advance cap first.
Claims that check themselves
A claim is a multi-line report of actual, per-diem and mileage lines — and the per-diem and mileage amounts are computed from the active policy, never hand-typed. Run policy and the engine returns the violations it found (over limit, missing receipt, duplicate, daily limit) and whether any is a hard stop. Then submit, approve and reimburse: a direct reimbursement posts one balanced GL entry that settles the linked advance and computes the net reimbursable — or what has to come back from the claimant.
Cards, client rebilling and the cockpit
Import a corporate-card statement, deduplicated on the reference, auto-match it against expense lines, then hand-match, mark personal or dispute whatever is left. Expense lines tagged billable to a customer can be rebilled to that client as an invoice. The T&E dashboard reads open requests, the approval queue, reimbursements and advances due, policy flags and spend by category and by traveller — every figure computed offline, with an optional written summary over the same snapshot and a deterministic duplicate scan.
What’s included
- Policy Studio — categories, versioned policies & rule lines
- Policy scope by org, grade, department, location or travel type
- Per-diem & mileage computed from the policy — zero hand-typed rates
- Multi-leg travel requests with bookings and linked advances
- Advance lifecycle with GL posting and 0–30/31–60/61–90/90+ ageing
- Violation detection: over-limit, missing receipt, duplicate, daily limit
- Reimbursement as one balanced GL entry that settles the advance
- Corporate-card statement import, auto-match, dispute & personal marking
- Rebill billable expense lines to the client as an invoice
- T&E dashboard — approvals, dues, policy flags, spend by category & traveller
Frequently asked
How is this different from the expense book?
The expense book records and categorises company spend against the ledger. This module runs the employee side of a trip — the request and its itinerary, the advance, the corporate card and a claim that is validated against a versioned policy before anyone is asked to approve it.
Where do per-diem and mileage rates live?
Only in policy rule lines. The engine resolves the applicable policy from the claimant’s grade, department, location and travel type, then computes the amount; where several lines match, the lowest limit wins. Nothing is hard-coded, so changing a rate is a policy edit, not a release.
Can I trust the amounts on a claim?
The policy engine is pure and deterministic — integer paise, rates in paise, distances in metres, per-diem days as integers — so the same claim and policy always produce the same figures and the same violations, with no floating-point drift.
Is Travel & Expense part of the offline desktop app?
No — it ships in the Cloud edition as its own grantable module, so finance and travellers can be given the T&E menu independently of the rest of the books. It does not run in, or sync to, the offline desktop edition.
What exactly is included in Travel & Expense · Cloud edition?
policy Studio — categories, versioned policies & rule lines, policy scope by org, grade, department, location or travel type, per-diem & mileage computed from the policy — zero hand-typed rates, multi-leg travel requests with bookings and linked advances, advance lifecycle with GL posting and 0–30/31–60/61–90/90+ ageing and violation detection: over-limit, missing receipt, duplicate, daily limit, and 4 more. Every item on that list is a working screen you can open in the trial rather than a capability described in the abstract.
How is travel & expense · cloud edition handled differently here?
It rests on policy is the only rate store, request the trip, then fund it, claims that check themselves and cards, client rebilling and the cockpit. The distinction that matters is that these are structural rather than cosmetic — the behaviour is built into how records are posted, not layered on as a report you have to remember to run.
Does Travel & Expense · Cloud edition post to the real books?
Yes, and that is the whole reason it lives in this product rather than beside it. What policy is the only rate store records lands in the same posted double-entry ledger the Trial Balance, P&L and GST returns are built from — so there is no second set of travel & expense · cloud edition numbers to reconcile against the first.
How does Travel & Expense · Cloud edition affect my GST?
It feeds it directly rather than sitting alongside it. CGST/SGST and IGST are split from HSN or SAC and place of supply as each document is raised, so whatever travel & expense · cloud edition produces is already correct when GSTR-1, 3B and 2B reconciliation are drawn off the same books. The return matches the accounts because it was never a separate exercise.
Does Travel & Expense · Cloud edition cost extra?
No. Travel & Expense · Cloud edition is part of the accounting core rather than a paid add-on, so request the trip, then fund it is there on the entry tier exactly as it is on the highest one. What the tiers change is reach and depth — devices, multi-branch and multi-warehouse reporting, and whether the conversational AI copilots are switched on.
Can I try Travel & Expense · Cloud edition before committing?
Yes — 14 days, no card. Test travel & expense · cloud edition against your own masters and your own transactions rather than sample data: the questions worth answering here are about your business's edge cases, and a demo dataset is built not to have any.