A travel expense file looks like a small thing. One trip, one person, four cost concepts. Until you open it.
Inside there is an expense settlement sheet, a travel authorization, a project form, transport invoices, boarding passes, the hotel receipt, the conference registration invoice, the attendance certificate and a handful of taxi and metro tickets. Nine different document types. And they all have to tell the same story.
The anchor document
In a travel file, the settlement sheet rules. It is the sheet where the entity declares how much was paid for each concept: transport, accommodation, meals, registration, and the total reimbursed.
Everything else is evidence. The agency invoices support the transport. The hotel receipt supports the accommodation. The conference invoice supports the registration. The boarding passes and the attendance certificate prove the trip happened and that the person was where they said they were.
Auditing the file means crossing the declaration against the evidence, concept by concept.
The checks
The first is amounts. The transport settled has to match the sum of the transport invoices. The accommodation settled, the hotel receipt total. The registration settled, the organizer's invoice. Cent by cent.
The second is dates and people. The trip dates declared in the settlement have to fit the authorization that approved it, the flight dates on the boarding passes and the hotel nights. And the traveller has to be the same person across every document: the person authorized, the passenger, the guest and the registrant.
The third is project allocation. The expense is charged to a project, and the project reference has to be consistent across the form, the authorization and the settlement.
Where it breaks
In the usual details, which are exactly the ones that eat the most time.
The hotel invoiced in a foreign currency. A stay paid in Czech crowns will never match the amount settled in euros; you have to apply the exchange rate and decide how much deviation is acceptable.
The composite PDF. Half the file's evidence arrives in a single document: boarding passes, hotel, registration and certificate, scanned in one go. Before matching anything, someone has to work out which page is which document.
The local transport tickets. Taxis, metro, ride hailing. Depending on the institution they are rolled into meals or into transport, so there is no automatic cross check: they have to be reviewed one by one.
And the scale. This is one trip. A project justification carries dozens, each with its nine document types.
How Jeff does it
You hand Jeff the file's folder exactly as it arrives, composite PDF included.
It classifies every document, and every section inside every document: it knows page 3 of the scan is a boarding pass and page 7 a registration invoice. It extracts the fields for each type: amounts, dates, people, project references, currencies. And it builds the working paper with one sheet per evidence type and the file as the anchor row.
Then it crosses. Transport settled against invoices. Hotel against receipt, with the currency conversion in plain sight. Registration against the conference invoice. Every difference comes out with the settled amount, the supported amount and the deviation, for the auditor to decide. What matches, in green. What does not, in red with its reason.
And if the auditor works against their own Excel template, Jeff pours the file's data into that format, field by field, without breaking the workbook's structure.
Every figure stays traced to its document, page and box. The attendance certificate included: if anyone asks whether the traveller was at the conference, the answer is one click away.
This is the third piece in the series on tasks Jeff solves end to end. If your travel files look like this, let's talk.
