Sample Thunk: Automate Expense Receipt Processing

Managing business expenses involves tracking spending, enforcing policies, and processing reimbursements—essential but time-consuming tasks. As businesses scale, manual expense management becomes increasingly inefficient, leading to delays, errors, and administrative overhead. AI automation can help streamline these processes, reducing effort while maintaining control and compliance.

One example is automating expense receipt processing. Instead of manually reviewing receipts, ensuring accuracy, and responding to employees, Thunk.AI can handle the entire workflow, while keeping you in the loop—from reading the receipt to checking the policy and telling the employee the outcome. Plus, it integrates seamlessly with your expense management systems, forms, or databases, making it easy to incorporate into your existing workflows.

This sample thunk is a chat app for expense receipts at a made-up company, Larkspur Labs. An employee opens the thunk's chat, gives their employee ID and attaches a photo of the receipt with a line on what it was for. The thunk then works through five steps:

1️⃣ Takes the receipt – confirms who the employee is in the expense system, reads the vendor, date and total from the photo, and asks for a clearer photo if it can't read them. Amounts in other currencies are converted to US dollars at the company's monthly rate.
2️⃣ Checks the policy – a code tool compares the receipt with the limit for its category and with the employee's earlier claims. The AI flags anything the policy never pays for, such as alcohol.
3️⃣ Sends exceptions to an approver – a receipt over its limit, or with something the policy excludes, waits for the employee's approver. The AI recommends a decision; a person confirms or changes it.
4️⃣ Files the claim – an approved receipt is filed in the expense system.
5️⃣ Tells the employee – the outcome, and the claim ID, arrive in the same chat.

The expense system in the sample is a stand-in thunk with the same kind of interface a real one would have, so you can connect your own expense system without changing the workflow. The limits and currency rates are a spreadsheet you can edit, and the policy is a document. The sample was tested with seven simulated conversations, including a blurred photo, a receipt that was already claimed and a request from a former employee.

Thunk.AI was built to ensure that AI-powered automation works seamlessly in enterprise environments. Our approach is guided by CHARM—a set of core capabilities that make AI work for businesses:

✅ Compliance – AI enforces company policies automatically, ensuring every expense follows the correct approval process.
✅ Human Oversight – Keep humans in the loop where needed—review AI decisions, make adjustments, and maintain full control.
✅ Automation – Reduce manual effort and let AI handle repetitive tasks like data extraction, policy verification, and communication.
✅ Reliability – AI executes tasks consistently and accurately, reducing human error and ensuring expenses are processed on time.
✅ Modularity – Easily customize and extend your workflow—integrate with existing applications, tools, and refine AI behavior as needed.

Watch this short video to see the sample at work. When you sign up for Thunk.AI, you will be able to copy this sample, customize and explore it.

You can also design your own AI-driven, expense processing workflow tailored to your approval processes, policies and business systems. Follow our step-by-step tutorial to create your own AI-powered Thunk.

Need help? Contact us at [email protected] if you need any assistance in using the platform.