Imagine you're rummaging through your luggage and find an old receipt from a business trip several months ago. What should you do? Try to expense it, of course! Most companies allow employees to submit T&E expenses within 90 to 180 days of purchase. This flexibility is great for employees—but it leaves companies vulnerable to reimbursing the same expense twice.

The duplicate expense problem

Sometimes an employee discovers an old receipt and genuinely doesn't remember being reimbursed already. Other times, duplicate submissions are deliberate fraud. Consider this scenario: coworkers at a business dinner pay with a single credit card, then each separately submits the same receipt for reimbursement—knowing they're unlikely to be caught.

The challenge? No auditor can recall thousands of line items from months ago. Expecting manual review to catch these duplicates is unrealistic—it would require comparing thousands of receipts to find potential matches, a process that could take months.

This is where AI-powered expense report auditing changes the game.

How AppZen detects duplicate expenses

AppZen's Expense Audit cross-references every expense report against historical data to instantly detect duplicate receipts—before reimbursement occurs. Here's how:

1. Identifying identical receipt images

Our AI reviews each line item of every expense report across all employees to identify duplicate receipt images. Even if two employees are on separate teams with different managers, the system automatically cross-references every receipt photo and flags matches.

This also works within the same report. The longer a business trip, the more expenses employees incur—making it more likely they'll accidentally upload the same receipt twice. AppZen flags every expense line with a matching receipt image, regardless of where it appears.

2. Flagging similar purchase information

Some employees who submit duplicates for personal gain are more creative. They might submit a non-itemized receipt for a meal in one expense report, then later submit the itemized version. An auditor could easily miss this since the receipts look different and the totals don't match (one includes a handwritten tip, the other shows just the subtotal).

This trick doesn't slip past AppZen's AI. The system reviews both the receipt contents and the information entered by the employee, checking:

  • Merchant name
  • Purchase date
  • Total receipt amount

If three of these criteria match any previously submitted expense—whether across reports or within the same report—AppZen marks it as high-risk and flags it for auditor review.

Prevention without judgment

AppZen isn't the judge or jury. Our AI can't determine whether a duplicate submission was a careless mistake or intentional fraud. But it ensures auditors see every expense that appears to be a duplicate—so your company never pays the same expense twice.

Ready to stop duplicate expenses before payment? Learn how AppZen Expense Audit catches duplicates automatically.