Overview of Expenses Agent

Expenses Agent delivers a modern, streamlined expense management experience designed to minimize manual data entry and accelerate processing times.

Employees follow the same workflow for nearly every business expense: charge the expense, forward the receipt, and respond only if Expenses Agent needs additional information. Expenses Agent handles receipt processing, matching, validation, and submission in the background, allowing employees to spend less time managing expense reports.

Expenses Agent is the AI agent that orchestrates the work behind that experience. Employees email receipts to Expenses Agent, which extracts transaction details such as the merchant, transaction date, amount, and line-item taxes; creates the expense item; matches it with the corresponding corporate card transaction when applicable; and follows up with employees by email to collect any missing information, resulting in a ready-to-submit expense item with minimal user intervention.

Key Concepts and Capabilities

• Expenses Agent vs. Touchless Expenses: Touchless Expenses describes the employee experience and business outcome: employees rarely need to build expense reports manually. Expenses Agent is the AI agent that delivers that experience. It receives emailed receipts, extracts expense information, creates and completes expense items, matches them with corporate card transactions, validates them against company policy, and proactively follows up with employees to resolve missing information. The agent orchestrates the end-to-end expense process, while the user interface, whether Oracle Expenses or another interaction surface, is used only for the small number of scenarios the agent can’t fully resolve on its own.
• Automated expense creation: Automatically creates draft expense items by parsing forwarded e-receipts and matching them with incoming corporate card transactions or creating reimbursable expenses when no card transaction exists.
• Email-based conversational completion: Enables users to provide missing transaction details, such as attendee lists or business purpose, through plain-text email replies.
• AI-powered policy inquiries: Answers natural language employee policy questions by searching published policy documents in AI Agent Studio.
• Configurable autosubmission: Automatically bundles compliant, fully validated expense items and submits them on a predefined schedule.
• Real-time card notifications: Delivers near-real-time mobile and email notifications for corporate card activity when supported by your Oracle card provider.
• Optimized mobile experience: Provides mobile access through the Progressive Web App (PWA), enabling users to capture receipts while on the go.
• Manual expense creation: While the operating model is designed around corporate cards and receipt forwarding, employees can still manually create expenses when necessary.

How it Works

1. Forward and capture: An employee charges a business expense and forwards an e-receipt or receipt photo to a dedicated company email alias.
2. Expense creation and matching: Expenses Agent uses intelligent document processing to extract transaction details, such as merchant, date, amount, and taxes, creates the expense item, and automatically matches it with a corresponding corporate card transaction when available. If no matching transaction exists, the agent creates the appropriate reimbursable expense.
3. Conversational completion: If information is missing, such as attendee names or project codes, Expenses Agent sends an email requesting the required details. The employee replies to the email, and Expenses Agent updates the expense item automatically.
4. Policy inquiries: Employees can ask natural language policy questions, for example, What is my daily dinner limit in Chicago?, and receive immediate, cited answers.
5. Touchless submission: Compliant expense items are automatically grouped into expense reports and submitted on a scheduled cadence minimizing or eliminating the need for employees to open Oracle Expenses. Employees interact with the application only when Expenses Agent can’t fully resolve an expense automatically.

Benefits

Implementing Expenses Agent provides measurable operational improvements across several key areas:

• Reduced administrative effort: Eliminates repetitive manual data entry for employees and finance teams by automatically creating and completing expense items.
• Improved employee experience: Employees spend less time managing expenses by simply sending receipts and responding only when the agent needs additional information, rather than creating and maintaining expense reports manually.
• Improved data accuracy: Uses AI to extract transaction details and capture required information, reducing manual entry errors.
• Faster processing cycles: Accelerates expense submission through continuous receipt processing and optional automatic submission.
• Improved policy compliance: Collects required information, such as business purpose and attendee details, before expense reports are submitted, helping reduce policy exceptions.

New vs. Existing Customers

To determine your initial setup path, identify your customer type below. All subsequent configuration sections build on this foundation.

If you’re…	Start here
A new customer (26B and later)	Expenses Agent is enabled by default. If you’ve completed the Oracle Expenses setup described in Implement Expenses, begin with Enable Expenses Agent for Business Units, then continue with the remaining configuration steps in this guide.
An existing customer	Opt-in is required. Enable the Expenses Agent Feature (Existing Customers Only), then proceed to Enable Expenses Agent for Business Units and the remaining configuration steps in this guide.