AI Use Cases for Travel & Expense: Pre-Submit Receipt Check

Travel and expense (T&E) compliance has always been a balancing act: protect the business from out-of-policy spend while keeping the employee experience fast and frictionless. What’s changed is the scale and subtlety of the risk. 

As AI use cases become more widespread, expense fraud tactics that once took time and manual effort can be produced quickly and at volume. At the same time, finance teams are under pressure to do more with less and optimize their approach to end-to-end auditing.

The solution isn’t simply “more audits.” It’s having controls in place that show up earlier in the process when employees are creating expenses, attaching receipts, and preparing to submit expense reports. This blog post will explore: 

• Why compliance has to evolve with AI
• What embedded compliance looks like in practice
• How pre-submit receipt check—fixing common receipt errors before expense report submission—can help prevent costly rework for employees and back-office teams

Why T&E compliance must evolve with AI

AI is changing T&E compliance in two directions at once. On one side, AI can help finance teams detect anomalies across large volumes of spend. On the other, it can be used to create more convincing policy abuse—sometimes intentionally, sometimes not—because the “right” way to describe or justify spend can be generated in seconds. That means compliance programs must evolve just as quickly, using AI not only to identify risk after the fact, but to prevent issues before they enter the expense workflow.

Deliberate fraud or innocent mistake? 

It’s important to make the distinction that most T&E compliance issues aren’t the result of deliberate fraud. They’re commonly driven by employees misinterpreting policies, leaving out information, or making honest mistakes, especially if they’re infrequent travelers. But when employees submit duplicate expenses, AI-optimized justifications, mismatched receipts, and incomplete data, it can be hard to tell the difference between innocent errors and intentional deception. Whatever the intention, the result is a bigger risk surface area and more time spent on reconciliation.

The downfall of reactive compliance 

Meanwhile, finance teams are facing increased workload without a proportional increase in headcount. When controls are solely reactive—triggered only after an expense report is submitted—review cycles lengthen, send-backs increase, and employees wait longer to be reimbursed. And because post-submission audits typically sample a subset of reports, issues that are small but repeated (and therefore expensive over time) can slip through.

The shift from reactive audits to embedded controls

The traditional expense compliance workflow often looks like this: employees submit a report, approvers review it, and only then do issues get flagged. That model made sense when volume was lower and risks were easier to spot with human review. But with more business travel, card program complexity, and sophisticated fraud tactics, compliance needs to be embedded throughout the process from start to finish. 

What is embedded compliance?

Embedded compliance is the idea that controls should be present where work happens. Throughout the expense lifecycle, that includes expense creation, submission, approval, and across spend data over time.  AI becomes a continuous layer—helping employees get things right the first time.

It’s proactive and preventive: guide the user during expense creation, validate receipts and required fields before submission, and continuously monitor for anomalies across spend data so audit teams can focus on targeted investigation rather than data cleanup.

What “embedded compliance” means in practice

• Controls before submission: Validate receipt quality and ensure receipt and expense details match while the employee is building the report—not after it’s routed.
• Controls during review: Flag compliance issues in reports, while surfacing clear, in-context guidance to resolve them — reducing guesswork for approvers and auditors.
• Controls across spend data: Detect patterns over time (for example, repeated small out-of-policy items) to catch “death by a thousand cuts.”
• AI as a continuous layer: Not relying on one checkpoint, but counting on ongoing assistance and detection across the lifecycle.

Pre-submit receipt check

With Concur Expense, embedded controls before expense report submission are not just a vision—they are reality. The pre-submit receipt check is an embedded AI feature of Concur Expense that validates receipts during expense creation, in real time and before an employee hits “submit.” The goal is simple: reduce preventable errors and flag issues early—without requiring each employee to become a T&E expert. 

Pre-submit receipt check delivers:

• Receipt and data completeness checks: Identifies missing information (dates, amounts, merchant details) that commonly lead to report rejections and send-backs.
• Duplicate receipt detection: Flags potential duplicates before they become exceptions later.
• Receipt/expense mismatch detection: Highlights inconsistencies between a receipt and the expense line item (amounts, currency, merchant) so the employee can correct or explain.
• Contextual guidance: Provides suggested actions—what to fix, what to confirm, and what additional details to add—so remediation is quick and specific.
• User control and transparency: Suggestions are provided to assist employees, but users remain in control of all decisions, edits, and final submissions
• Value for multiple stakeholders: Employees get fewer interruptions and faster reimbursement; audit teams get cleaner, more consistent inputs and fewer low-value investigations.

Benefits of pre-submit receipt check

1. Fewer expense report send-backs: Employees resolve missing info and mismatches before the report ever enters the approval flow.
2. Reduced approval delays and audit workload: Approvers see cleaner reports, and auditors can spend time on true exceptions instead of basic corrections.
3. Better employee experience: Less rework, fewer interruptions, and faster reimbursement—while still reinforcing policy compliance.

Conclusion: Pre-submit receipt check is where embedded compliance starts

AI is quickly becoming essential to both efficiency and fraud prevention in T&E—not because it replaces people, but because it can complement human efforts by operating continuously, at scale, and with consistency. The teams that step forward will be those that leverage embedded AI-powered controls to minimize routine issues (missing fields, mismatches, duplicate expenses) and free experts to focus on the highest-impact exceptions.

But embedded compliance goes beyond the pre-submit receipt check AI use case; it requires a holistic approach. No single rule or model will catch every form of policy abuse, especially as tactics evolve. Embedded compliance layers combined with continuous compliance monitoring across spend data creates long-term resilience, better real-time visibility, more consistent enforcement, and fewer painful surprises at month-end or audit time.

Look for more information on how to turn on this feature for your organization and the roll out plan here, and discover other AI capabilities in SAP Concur to support end-to-end T&E compliance. 

FAQ

How is AI changing expense fraud in travel and expense management?

AI is making expense fraud easier to create and harder to spot, especially with mismatched receipts, polished justifications, duplicate expenses, and manipulated data. At the same time, AI is also helping finance teams detect anomalies earlier and monitor spend more consistently at scale.

How can organizations audit 100% of expense reports without manual review?

Organizations can audit 100% of expense reports by using AI-powered controls to automatically scan every report for policy violations, receipt issues, duplicates, and risk signals. Human auditors can then focus on the highest-risk exceptions instead of reviewing every report manually.

What is embedded compliance in travel and expense?

Embedded compliance in T&E means placing controls directly into the expense workflow so issues can be prevented earlier, not just caught after submission. In practice, it uses AI to guide employees, validate receipts and required fields, flag potential issues during review, and monitor spend patterns over time so audit teams can focus on higher-risk exceptions.

What is pre-submit receipt check?

 Pre-submit receipt check brings AI-powered receipt validation to all Concur Expense users, automatically checking receipts during expense creation and before submission. The feature identifies common compliance issues—such as missing data, duplicates, and receipt-expense mismatches—and provides actionable suggestions to help users fix problems before they submit.

Why is pre-submit receipt check important?

Pre-submit receipt check feature within Concur Expense checks for common receipt errors so employees can fix issues before submitting a report. It matters because employees can fix missing information, receipt mismatches, or possible duplicates immediately, reducing send-backs and reimbursement delays.

What’s the difference between pre‑submit receipt check and a post‑submission audit?

Pre-submit receipt check happens while an employee is creating an expense report, helping prevent errors before submission. Post-submission audits review reports after they enter the approval or audit workflow, often to investigate exceptions or policy violations.

How can finance teams balance expense compliance with employee experience?

One way finance teams can balance compliance and employee experience is by using embedded controls that guide employees before they submit expenses. This reduces rework and delays while helping finance teams maintain stronger policy enforcement and fraud prevention.