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Solution · Other solutionsThe folio can still be reissued this week; by the reclaim it cannot
Missing itemisations and tax lines caught at submission
Every receipt, folio and invoice is read and tested against the documentation rules at submission, while a corrected document can still be obtained.
Executive summary
The VAT on a hotel night is lost in the week the folio is wrong, not in the quarter the adviser finds it.
The check runs at submission, before the manager sees the report, because that is the only moment when a wrong document can still be replaced.
VAT that is currently written off becomes recoverable, because the billing entity and the itemisation are questioned while the hotel still has the…
SAP Concur status and tax fields; SAP tax accounts; SharePoint reclaim file
Business problem
Travel & expense
Documentation rules exist so that an expense survives a tax audit and, where the law allows, returns its VAT. They are known to a handful of people in finance and to almost nobody else. An employee attaches whatever the hotel handed over at checkout, the approving manager looks at the total, and an accountant discovers weeks later that the folio is a card slip, that the invoice names a person rather than a legal entity, or that the training dinner for twelve has no attendee sheet.
Some failures cost more than others. A wrong billing entity or a missing itemisation destroys the VAT claim outright. An absent tax line means the amount is booked gross and the reclaim stays understated for the rest of its life. Lost-receipt declarations are a legitimate exception that a few people turn into a routine, and nobody counts them. An affiliate in a country with a fiscal invoice regime adds a document type the European finance team cannot read, let alone verify.
What makes the problem permanent is timing. Every check happens after the trip and usually after the month, and by then the document cannot be corrected: the hotel has closed the folio, the employee has forgotten which colleagues sat at the table. The rule set that would catch all of it lives in the memory of two accountants, which is also why it is applied differently in eight countries.
How it works today
What follows is the shape we find in most organisations that reclaim travel VAT through an adviser.
- PersonThe employee photographs whatever the hotel, restaurant or taxi handed over and attaches the images to a report in SAP Concur
- PersonThe line manager approves on the total and the category, without opening the images
- WaitingThe report sits in the finance queue until an accountant reaches it, one to two weeks after the trip
- PersonThe accountant checks documentation where experience says to look: folios, entertainment, anything unusual
- Risk of errorInvoices addressed to the employee are accepted, because the stay is months old and a correction is no longer realistic
- PersonTax amounts are keyed by hand where noticed and left out where the document is unclear
- SystemThe quarterly reclaim file is built from whatever survived, sent to the adviser, and part of it comes back rejected
Why the current process costs more than it appears
The most expensive part of this process has no cost line.
- Recoverable tax is the largest line and the least visible one, because a refund that is never claimed appears in no ledger, no variance report and no budget.
- Rework is paid twice: once by the accountant who writes the return and once by the employee who chases a document that no longer exists.
- Declarations that began as a sensible exception become a habit for a few people, and because nobody counts them per person, the control auditors ask about by name is the one the company cannot evidence.
- Each new country, acquisition and hotel chain adds rules and formats while the number of accountants who know them stays the same, and none of that knowledge is written down.
- Exposure does not stop at VAT. A tax audit that finds unsupported expenses moves on to deductibility and, in several jurisdictions, to the employee's own tax position.
Cost of inaction
A refund nobody claims leaves no trace in the accounts, which is why this cost never reaches an agenda. The reclaim arrives, the rejection rate is noted, and the rejected share becomes the baseline against which next year is judged. The behaviour hardens with it: employees whose reports keep coming back for documents that could not be obtained learn that documentation is negotiable, and the use of declarations grows.
The second risk is concentration. Two accountants hold the country rules and the knowledge of which chains issue which folio. When they move on, the rules do not move with them, and the first sign is a rejection rate that has changed for no visible reason.
A plausible organisation with realistic proportions. The figures are there to be recalculated on your data; they are not a client result.
The European commercial organisation of a pharmaceutical company: 1,900 field and office staff across eight countries plus an affiliate in China, SAP Concur for expenses, SAP for the ledger, Microsoft 365 as the workplace.
About 2,300 expense reports a month carrying some 14,000 lines, of which roughly 3,100 are hotel nights; VAT is reclaimed quarterly in six countries through an adviser.
Two accountants review documentation when the report reaches finance, one to two weeks after the trip. Around a fifth of hotel lines fail the VAT rules, and 560 reports a month are returned at least once for a missing document.
Every check happens after the correction window has closed. The employee cannot obtain a corrected folio, the accountant cannot code tax that is not printed, and the adviser sees the result a quarter later.
At submission a robot pulls the report and its images, Document Understanding reads receipts and folios, and a rule set written with the tax team tests itemisation, billing entity, tax lines, attachments, declaration counts and fiscal fields. Anything missing goes back the same day in Microsoft Teams, naming the exact document.
In the modelled case, roughly 70% of the VAT currently lost on hotel documentation becomes recoverable and the rework behind returned reports falls by about 60%. These are modelled figures on stated assumptions; your country mix decides the real ones.
Proposed solution
The check runs at submission, before the manager sees the report, because that is the only moment when a wrong document can still be replaced. A UiPath robot, triggered through the UiPath Integration Service connector for SAP Concur, retrieves the report and its images. UiPath Document Understanding reads receipts with the pre-trained Receipts model, and folios, foreign invoices and fiscal documents with Generative Extraction, returning supplier, tax number, billing name, line items, tax rate, tax amount, date and currency. Fields the model is unsure about go to a person as a Document Validation action rather than into a rule.
The rules then run on every line. Hotel lines without an itemised folio are returned. Invoices whose billing name is not the correct legal entity go back with a template the employee forwards to the hotel. Receipts showing tax have the rate and amount coded to the recoverable account; those from registered suppliers showing none above a threshold are marked non-recoverable and never enter the reclaim. Expense types with mandatory attachments, event meals with attendee sheets and conference fees with registrations, are checked for them. Lost-receipt declarations are counted per employee over a rolling period and escalated above a threshold agreed with HR. Affiliate fiscal documents are tested for mandatory fields and, where a service exists, verified with the tax authority.
Anything a person must do arrives in Microsoft Teams as a UiPath Action Center task naming the document, the line, the reason and a due date. Reports that pass continue to the manager with the tax already coded. The quarterly reclaim file is generated from the extracted data with a link to each image, so the adviser receives evidence rather than a folder, and Power BI shows compliance and recoverable VAT by country.
UiPath Document Understanding pre-trained Receipts model and Generative Extraction; Document Validation actions in UiPath Action Center; actionable Action Center notifications in Microsoft Teams; UiPath Orchestrator queues, credential store and audit log; UiPath Integration Service connector for SAP Concur
The documentation rule set by country (itemisation, billing entity, tax lines, attachments, declaration counts, fiscal formats), the return texts employees can act on, tax coding write-back, the reclaim file and the Power BI model
Fiscal-document verification with the tax authority's service where available; SAP tax-account posting and the adviser's file format
How the automated process works
- AutomationSubmission triggers the robot, which retrieves the report, its lines and every image
- AutomationDocument Understanding classifies each image and extracts supplier, billing name, tax number, line items, tax rate and amount
- PersonFields below the confidence threshold go to a Document Validation action and are confirmed in seconds
- AutomationThe rule set tests itemisation, billing entity, tax lines, attachments, declaration counts and fiscal fields on every line
- AutomationClean reports continue to manager approval with the recoverable tax coded and the rule trail attached
- PersonFailing reports return to the employee as an Action Center task in Microsoft Teams naming the document, with a due date
- AutomationResubmissions are re-checked, repeated declarations escalate to the tax team, and the reclaim file is generated from the extracted data
Human-in-the-loop model
Automation handles
- Reading receipts, folios, invoices and fiscal documents in the languages the organisation travels in
- Itemisation, billing entity, tax line and attachment tests on every line of every report
- Counting lost-receipt declarations per employee and applying the escalation threshold
- Tax coding, the rule trail, the reclaim file and the country reporting
People decide
- Whether an unclear document is acceptable, which is a tax judgement
- Country rules, thresholds and what happens when a declaration count is exceeded
- Obtaining the corrected invoice, which only the employee can do and only quickly
- Whether a pattern of declarations needs an investigation rather than a reminder
Before and after
Systems and integrations
Every entry can be checked in vendor documentation. The evidence class is stated next to each one.
Inputs
- SAP Concur reports and images
- hotel folios and supplier invoices
- affiliate fiscal documents
- the adviser's rejection list
Automation layer
- UiPath Orchestrator
- UiPath Robots
- UiPath Document Understanding
- UiPath Integration Service
- UiPath Action Center
Target systems
- SAP Concur status and tax fields
- SAP tax accounts
- SharePoint reclaim file
- Power BI
Human touchpoints: Action Center tasks in Microsoft Teams; Document Validation actions; the tax team's quarterly rule review
Technologies used
pre-trained Receipts model; Generative Extraction for folios, foreign invoices and fiscal documents
Alow-confidence fields confirmed by a person before any rule runs
Athe return task naming the missing document, with a due date
Asubmission trigger, report and image retrieval, status and tax write-back
Aqueues, schedules, retries, credential store and the audit log
Athe reclaim file and the linked evidence the adviser reads
Adocumentation compliance and recoverable VAT by country and travel supplier
Aour design: itemisation, billing entity, tax, attachments, declarations, fiscal formats
CIllustrative economic model
The arithmetic is open, so it can be argued with.
Rework is the only pool the calculator prices; the recovered tax is worked out separately below, because it does not behave like minutes. Of the 560 reports a month returned for documentation, 60% of the effort is absorbed by catching the problem at submission, so the calculator volume is 336 rather than 560 and the rest stays with people as judgement. Fifteen minutes covers both sides of a return, and €41 an hour is an assumed fully loaded accountant cost in Central Europe.
Run the numbers on your data
An illustrative estimate from your own inputs. It models released capacity; it is not a promise of savings.
Business benefits
- VAT that is currently written off becomes recoverable, because the billing entity and the itemisation are questioned while the hotel still has the stay in front of it
- Returns become useful: one task, one named document, one due date, instead of an email saying the documentation is incomplete
- Tax is coded from the document rather than from an accountant's reading of it, so the reclaim file is built from data
- The declaration exception becomes a measured control with a threshold, which is what an auditor asks to see
- Affiliate fiscal documents are handled the same way every month, whoever is at their desk
- The rules stop being institutional memory and become a versioned artefact the tax team owns
The management view
- Recoverable VAT by country, and beside it the share actually supported by compliant documents, which turns a vague leak into a number with a reason
- Return rates by reason and by team, so a rule change is judged on the following month rather than argued about
- Declaration counts per employee with amounts, produced by rule and logged, so the control is demonstrable rather than asserted
- Rule ownership sits with the tax team and every version is recorded, which makes the audit conversation about content
Board-level KPIs
Security and governance
Trust in automation is built on the audit trail, not on a promise.
- Receipts carry personal and supplier data, so extraction and rules run in the client's tenant and the EU region of UiPath Automation Cloud, with the Microsoft 365 side governed by the tenant's own residency settings
- The robot's expense-system account reads reports and writes status, tax fields and rule references; it cannot approve, pay or delete, and its secret is issued and rotated through the platform's credential store rather than held by a person
- Extraction calls run under the UiPath AI Trust Layer with an approved model list, masking of fields the rules do not need, and a log of every call
- Declaration counting is a control on a legitimate exception, so its threshold is documented, applied uniformly and reviewed with HR and the works council where local law requires it
- Fiscal-document verification sends identifiers and nothing else, and every return, escalation and coding decision is attributable to a rule version and a person
Why now
The correction window, not the budget cycle, sets the deadline: a folio can usually be reissued within weeks of the stay and effectively never afterwards, so each month without the check writes off another 620 lines
Tax administrations are digitising in both directions, with e‑invoicing mandates outbound and verification services inbound, which makes authenticity checkable by interface rather than by trust
Generative extraction now reads folios and foreign invoices well enough to test them against rules, which removes the dependency on an accountant recognising the format
Relevant executive roles
Money the tax authority would have refunded is either claimed or written off, and this decides which
The reclaim file is assembled from compliant documents with evidence attached, and rejection reasons stop being a surprise
Returns become one task with one named document, and rule-by-memory ends in eight countries at once
Common questions and objections
They screen what reaches them, which is what survived. By then the hotel cannot reissue anything. This check runs at submission, the only point where the document is still obtainable.
They can ask at checkout, and they will once a return arrives the same day naming the document. Most of it is fixed upstream anyway, by putting the company's billing details into the travel agency profile.
They remain so. Reading the mandatory fields and testing authenticity where a service exists is a service to the local team, not a transfer of responsibility.
When this is not the right solution
- Travel is small or almost entirely domestic where VAT on travel is not recoverable; what remains is rework reduction, which rarely justifies the work alone
- Receipts are not imaged at submission, in which case capture is the first project and this is the second
- The expense system already applies country-specific documentation rules and the reclaim runs on them
- No tax owner is available to decide thresholds and country rules, and a rule set nobody owns is overridden within a quarter
A question for the next management meeting
For last year's travel, can this company say how much recoverable VAT never entered the reclaim file, and name the date on which each of those documents stopped being fixable?
Implementation approach
Delivery runs in stages, so it can be stopped at any point.
We deliver
- A read of one quarter of reports against the adviser's rejection list, which quantifies the gap before anything is built
- The documentation rule set per country, written with the tax team and versioned, with declaration and tax thresholds
- Document configuration: Receipts model tuning, Generative Extraction for folios, confidence thresholds, language coverage
- The automation: retrieval, rules, returns in Microsoft Teams, tax coding and the reclaim file
- An advisory pilot in two countries, so finance sees what would have been returned before employees do
- Power BI reporting and a rule-maintenance routine for the quarters that follow
We need from you
- One quarter of expense reports with images, and the adviser's findings for the same period
- A named tax owner for country rules and thresholds, and a finance owner for returns
- A service account in the expense system that reads reports and writes status and tax fields
- The documentation rules as they exist today, including those that live only in conversation
Stages
Discovery
A quarter of history read against the adviser's rejections; rules and gaps written down per country
Rules
Documentation tests, thresholds and return texts agreed and versioned with the tax team
Build
Extraction, rule execution, Teams returns, tax coding and the reclaim file
Advisory run
The check runs on live submissions in two countries without returning anything, and thresholds are tuned
Go-live
Returns switched on country by country, with hypercare and a weekly review of reasons
Optimisation
Fiscal documents, further countries and quarterly rule updates
Quick win. The rule set is small and the extraction is pre-trained; effort follows the number of countries with their own rules and how the expense system exposes images and status fields.
312 hotel invoices last year were addressed to a person, not to this company.
Send us 200 hotel lines with their images from any quarter, with the adviser's rejection list. You get back a failure breakdown by rule and country, and the size of the reclaim that was available at the time.
Test 200 hotel lines against the rulesThe neighbouring process usually has the same problem
Stop paying nine expense claims in ten on trust because nobody has time to check them against policy.
View solution Other solutionsEvery expense report audited before the money leavesA sample checked after payment finds errors it cannot recover and misses the duplicates entirely.
View solution Other solutionsYour expense policy executed line by line, automaticallyYour policy names the caps. The approver sees a total, a category and thirty other reports.
View solutionIndustries we deliver this in most oftenManufacturing & industryServices & ITFinance & insuranceShared services