A month-end close with no receipts to chase

At most small companies, the travel part of the monthly close follows the same pattern. Card statements arrive. Somebody in finance lines them up against a folder of receipts. A third of the charges have no receipt. The rest of the week is spent asking people to look in their email, their camera roll and their jacket pockets.

When we asked new customers how long this took them, the median answer was two days. Almost none of that time was accounting.

Where receipts come from

The first step was simply to collect receipts where they are created, rather than where someone remembers to put them:

• The travel inbox. Airlines, rail and car rental send confirmations and receipts by email. Forward them, or point the travel address at Pioneer, and they arrive on their own.
• Hotel folios. Hotels send a folio at checkout. Pioneer reads each line and codes the room, the taxes and the parking separately.
• Photos. For everything else, a photo at the counter. It takes three seconds and saves a week.

Matching as it happens

Each receipt is matched to its card charge within minutes of both existing. The amounts, the merchant and the date usually line up exactly. When they do not, a tip on a meal or a deposit at check-in, Pioneer pairs them and notes the difference rather than leaving both open.

By the end of the month, the open items are the genuinely missing ones, usually a handful, and each one comes with a name and a date.

The close used to be about finding paper. Now it is about reading where the money went.

Coding without a lookup table

Matched charges are coded to your chart of accounts as they arrive: airfare, lodging, ground transport, meals. Classes and cost centers come from the trip itself, so a charge on the Santa Fe offsite card lands in the offsite's cost center without anyone choosing it.

Once a day, the matched and coded charges are sent to your books. Anything you do not sync goes out as a clean CSV with the same columns.

The receipts that are really missing

There will always be a few. A taxi in a town where the driver only took cash, a parking meter, a receipt that blew away at a market stall. For those, Pioneer asks the traveler for a one-line note the day after the charge, while they still remember it, and attaches the note in place of the receipt. Your auditors will still want to see a policy for missing receipts, and now each one has a reason written by the person who spent the money.

What the close looks like now

For a team of fifty with around two hundred travel charges a month, the close becomes a review rather than a hunt. Open the month, read the totals by category, look at the three or four exceptions that were approved and why, and sign off.

Most of our customers tell us it takes under half an hour. The time that is left over tends to go into the question finance actually cares about, which is whether the trips were worth taking.