Stop chasing expense receipts: get every claim in by month end

If you manage people who spend company money, you know the first week of the month. Finance wants the numbers closed. Half the team has not submitted. You send the reminder email, then the second one, then you approve whatever arrives because there is no time to look. Chasing expense receipts has quietly become part of your job, and nobody agreed to that.

This article looks at why the chasing happens, why the usual fix (more emails) does not work, and a month-end loop that gets every claim submitted and approved without a manager acting as a debt collector.

The problem has two sides

The manager's side

The chasing is not imagined. In a vendor-commissioned survey of 500 UK employees by ExpenseIn and AccountsIQ (June 2025), 28% said they are chased for missing receipts weekly and 10% daily. Capture Expense's analysis of 371,381 UK claims across 460 organisations (the vendor's own platform data) found that 27% of claims took more than 30 days to approve, and only 2.6% were approved the same day.

What happens once the claim finally arrives is not much better. AppZen, an expense-audit vendor, describes managers rubber-stamping reports in "no more than 15 seconds". SAP Concur ships an admin report literally named "Reports Approved But Receipts Not Viewed", which tells you how common that outcome is. Approval tools add their own noise: a Concur reviewer on Trustpilot described "twenty six emails when personally making one travel reservation", another described approvals that time out and cancel themselves, and a Payhawk reviewer on Capterra called request notifications "the worst part". A manager drowning in notifications approves blind. That is the expense approval workflow most companies actually run.

The employee's side

Late expense submissions are usually blamed on the person. The evidence suggests the process is doing most of the work. In Soldo's 2025 survey of 1,010 UK employees (vendor-commissioned), 55% said they hesitate to submit expenses and 41% said they never submit some purchases at all. Lost receipts are the oldest reason: a Barclaycard poll in 2018 found 33% of UK workers had lost receipts, and a Capital One poll in 2012 found 42%. Roughly one in three, consistently, over a decade.

Then there is the money. Airwallex's 2025 survey of 2,000 UK employees (vendor-commissioned) found only 30% were reimbursed within a week, 28% waited three to four weeks or more, and 43% had experienced financial hardship while waiting. An employee who has been out of pocket for a month has little reason to rush the next claim in. The two sides feed each other.

We cover the full cost of this loop in the true cost of manual expense claims in the UK.

Why chasing by email fails

Most chasing looks the same: a group email on the 1st, individual emails on the 3rd, a slightly sharper one on the 5th. It fails for four reasons that have nothing to do with tone.

1. The email has no link to the thing. "Please submit your August expenses" asks the person to go and find the form, the folder, the scanner. Every step between the reminder and the task is a place to stop.
2. You cannot see who is late. Without a list, you either email everyone (and annoy the people who submitted on the 28th) or keep your own spreadsheet of who has replied.
3. The employee does not know what is missing. They think they submitted; you think they did not; the receipt for the hotel is in a coat pocket. Nobody can see the gap.
4. You cannot see the receipt beside the amount. When claims do arrive, they come as a form with a stapled bundle or a spreadsheet with a folder of photos. Checking one claim means opening three things, so you check none of them.

Fix those four and the chasing mostly stops. Here is a loop that does.

A better month-end loop in five steps

1. Capture at the moment of spend

The receipt is lost between the till and the desk. Photograph it at the till, with the phone already in hand, and the "one in three lost" problem disappears. The photo has to be quick and it has to be enough: merchant, date, total and VAT read off the image, with the person confirming rather than typing.

2. One tap to submit the month, and be told exactly what is incomplete

Do not make people assemble a report. Everything captured in a month is the report. One button sends it, and if something is not ready, the message says precisely what: "3 submitted, 1 needs a category". No guessing, no silent rejection three weeks later.

3. A manager view of who has and has not submitted

Open a list. Each person on your team, last month, one of three states: awaiting your approval, not yet submitted, approved. Who is late is a glance, not a spreadsheet.

4. A one-click chase that links straight to their month

When someone is late, one tap sends a polite email that links directly to their month page. They open it, see what is missing, tap Submit. The chase is recorded, so you also know when you last asked.

5. Approve with the receipt beside the amount

Each expense shows its receipt image next to the amount and category, so a real check takes seconds. Small routine claims under a sensible limit approve automatically. Anything unusual (much higher than that person's normal, a possible duplicate, a weekend capture) is flagged and has to be opened before it can be approved.

How Costrix does each step

Costrix is built around exactly this loop, for UK and Irish businesses of roughly 20 to 150 staff.

• Capture. The employee photographs the receipt in the app; it is auto-cropped and read, the fields are pre-filled, and they confirm on one screen. Receipts with no VAT information are fine.
• Submit month. Home shows each month as a tile flagged Submitted or Not submitted. Inside a month, any receipt that is not ready carries an amber note saying what it needs. "Submit month" sends the lot in one tap and reports back honestly, for example "3 submitted, 1 needs a category — fix and submit again".
• The team month list. The Approvals screen opens on last month by default, because a manager's job is to sign off months that have closed. Each report shows as Awaiting approval, Not yet submitted or Approved, with a detail line such as "3 waiting on you, 2 still unsent". Awaiting sits at the top, because that is the state where you are the blocker.
• Chase. Anyone in the Not yet submitted state has a Chase button. It sends a short email with the manager as the Reply-To, linking straight to that person's month, and the row then shows "Chased 27 Aug". The button asks you to confirm, so a mis-tap never sends anything.
• Approve. Open a person's month and each expense sits beside its receipt image. Approve or reject individually (a rejection needs a reason, which the employee sees), or approve everything in view at once. Claims under a per-team, per-category limit are approved automatically at submission and never reach your queue. Anything unusual — a possible duplicate, a claim well above that person's normal, a large amount — carries a flag on the row. The flag is advisory: it tells you where to look, it does not stop you approving.
• Cover. Approval peers let two people sign each other off when a manager is away, and a manager can see their whole reporting tree.
• No email for missing card receipts. When finance imports the corporate card statement, any charge with no receipt lands on the cardholder's own month page as a red missing line. They add it there. Finance's side of that is covered in reconciling company credit card statements faster.

Every decision, chase and change is written to an audit log, and the receipt image stays attached to its expense — which is what you need to be able to produce for the six-year VAT record-keeping rules.

What this is worth

The headline figure is an estimate for a 50-person firm with 75 claims a month.

Assumptions: 50 staff, half of whom claim in a typical month, three claims each; loaded hourly cost of £38 for a line manager and £25 for a finance assistant, derived from ONS ASHE 2025 median pay and advertised salaries plus employer on-costs. Most of the survey figures above are vendor-commissioned and the GBTA estimate is from 2015, so treat every number here as an estimate.

The honest note is that the biggest win is the one we cannot put a number on: reports stop dribbling in for three weeks. When every month is submitted by the 3rd and approved by the 5th, finance closes on time, the ledger reflects the month it belongs to, and nobody has "chase expenses" on their to-do list any more.

A policy paragraph you can adopt today

Copy this into your expenses policy and change the dates to suit.

Expenses by the 3rd. Photograph every receipt when you receive it and log it the same day where possible. Submit your month by the 3rd working day of the following month; anything submitted later may fall into the next payment run. Your line manager will approve or return claims by the 5th working day, and approved cash expenses are paid in the payroll or payment run immediately following. If a claim is returned, the reason will be stated; correct it and resubmit. Company-card charges without a receipt must have one added before month end. If you will be away at month end, submit before you go.

The reciprocal commitment matters. A deadline for staff only works alongside a deadline for approvers and a fixed payment date. The Airwallex figures above are what happens when only the first of the three exists.

What to do next

If you want to see the loop rather than read about it, start a 7-day free trial of Costrix at /signup. Add your team, set their line managers, and by next month end you will be opening a list instead of writing an email. Pricing is on the front page; nothing is charged for the first week and you can cancel at any time.