Automate Expense Report Processing and Approvals

Many small businesses start with spreadsheets or tools like Expensify and Zoho Expense. While better than nothing, these tools force you into a rigid, one-size-fits-all workflow. Their rules engines are limited to simple, single-step approvals. If you need conditional logic, their systems often break down, forcing you back to manual emails and spreadsheets for exceptions.

Consider a 15-person consulting firm where expenses must be approved by a project manager against a specific project budget, with a second approval from the director for any expense over $1,000. Expensify cannot handle this two-step, conditional, budget-aware routing. The project manager must export a CSV, manually check it against their project budget spreadsheet, then forward the request to the director via email. This disjointed process takes days and creates a messy, unauditable paper trail.

The structural problem is that off-the-shelf expense tools are built with a fixed data model. They are not designed to incorporate your business's unique context, like project codes, client-billable flags, or departmental budgets. They sell a per-user subscription for a generic product, forcing you to adapt your process to their software's limitations. A custom system, however, adapts the software to your exact process.

The engagement starts with a discovery session to map your exact expense and approval workflow. We define every expense category, approval threshold, and routing rule. Syntora identifies the data sources, whether it is company credit cards via Stripe or bank accounts via Plaid, and determines how to integrate with your general ledger. The result is a complete workflow diagram and data schema that you approve before any code is written.

We built our internal financial system connecting Plaid and Stripe to a PostgreSQL ledger, processing bank syncs in under 3 seconds. A custom system for your business would follow a similar pattern. A FastAPI service would handle incoming transaction data. Python scripts would run the categorization and approval logic. We would use Supabase for the database and a simple front-end, as its row-level security is ideal for managing permissions and user roles.

The delivered system is a simple web application where your team can view and manage expenses. Approvers receive email or Slack notifications with one-click approval links. Once approved, the transaction is automatically formatted and sent to your accounting software. You receive the full source code, deployment scripts, and a runbook for maintenance.