Admin guide: Expense Policy Agent

Overview
How expense policy agent works
First time setup
        Customise your agent with your policy
        Baseline protection without a policy
Controls
FAQs
        What are AI agents?
        How does the agent handle data privacy?
        What languages does expense policy agent support?
        Can I apply different policies to different international entities?
        How can I specify exceptions?
        Can I test a policy before it goes live?
        What does expense policy agent actually check?
        Does it know how I've configured my expense submission forms?
        What happens when a field is hidden from employees?
        What about fields marked as optional?
        How can I track my agent's performance?

 

Overview

Expense policy agent lets you turn your own expense policy into an always-on AI reviewer for every employee card expense and reimbursement report your team submits. Available to Grow and Accelerate customers, it reads your policies to flag potential violations.

Once trained on your policies, your policy agent helps you:

• Save time: Reduce the manual workload of reading receipts, cross-checking values, and verifying each line against your policy.

• Increase accuracy: Catch duplicates, mismatched currencies, and policy violations that humans might miss, based on the rules you actually enforce today.

• Educate users: Provide clear, policy-based explanations when an expense is flagged, including links to the relevant section(s) of your policy so approvers understand the “why”.

Even if you haven’t set an expense policy yet, expense policy agent still provides baseline protection out of the box by checking for standard errors like duplicate receipts and obviously wrong values.

Note: While your expense policy agent is highly accurate, by design human approvers maintain full control and final decision-making power over all expenses.

How expense policy agent works

Policy agent works in the background of your expense approval flow.

When an employee submits a card expense or reimbursement report:

• General checks: expense policy agent first takes note of your current settings (e.g., required fields).

• AI evaluation: expense policy agent reads the expense details and its attachments, checks for issues like duplicates or wrong values, and if customized, compares all details against your expense policies and its hidden notes.

  • If compliant: your agent marks the expense as verified. A green badge appears.

  • If non-compliant or in doubt: your agent flags the expense for review. It will list one or more reasons and link to specific section(s) of your policy that may have been violated.

Expense policy agent is a tool to accelerate, not replace, human judgment.

• Humans remain in control: Approvers and Admins can always choose to approve an expense even if your agent flagged it.

• Feedback loop: Your users can send feedback with the thumbs up/down feature on specific flags raised by your agent or its lack thereof. This helps reporting when the agent was helpful or if its interpretation was inaccurate. It does not train the agent automatically.

Important: Your existing Airwallex settings (submission deadlines, approval routing, form requirements) always override your agent. I.e If a hard rule/setting is set on an expense, your expense policy agent will not challenge it.

First time setup

The most powerful way to use your policy agent is to customise it with your own expense policies. Once configured, it uses expense policies as its source of truth for what is in or out of policy during review.

1. Customise your agent with your policy

1. Navigate to Spend > Expenses > Settings > Expense policy agent.

2. New policy: either upload source documents from your company, or generate a policy based on best practices. You can review and edit your expense policy before publishing. Follow our dedicated set up guide here.

3. Activation: your agent begins enforcing your specific rules immediately once a policy is published. Your expenses policies are your agent’s knowledge for what’s in or out of the policy during review.

2. Baseline protection without a policy

If you haven’t edited an expense policy yet, expense policy agent is still automatically enabled for all Grow and Accelerate customers to enforce baseline compliance, such as detecting duplicate receipts and other obvious issues. You can rely on this default behaviour from day one, then unlock deeper, policy-specific checks as soon as you publish your own policy documents.

Controls

Two level of controls are built in with your expense policy agent.

1. If your organization would like to stop your policy agent from evaluating your expenses, use the top-level setting:

• Configure your policy agent to evaluate expenses: enabled

  • click edit

  • select Disable

  • click checkmark and confirm

Your policy agent will be disabled and will no longer evaluate expenses. Previous evaluations and your active policies are preserved.

2. If you would like to change who can see AI evaluations, a visibility control is live while your agent is enabled. By default visibility is set to all users: all your employees and approvers will see flags and verifications. To edit this control:

• Who can view policy agent evaluations: all users

  • click edit

  • select Expense admins

  • click checkmark and confirm

Your policy agent is now restricted to show evaluations only to your Admins and Owner roles.

FAQs

What are AI agents?

AI agents are task-focused AI capabilities designed to handle specific finance workflows. Each agent supports a defined job, such as matching receipts, extracting invoice details, flagging unusual spend, or guiding setup. They work autonomously to reduce errors and manual work across expenses and accounts payable.

How does the agent handle data privacy?

Airwallex takes privacy seriously. Information we collect and retain is governed by the standard Airwallex Privacy Policy.

When you add a policy:

• We convert it into an "AI-friendly" format.

• We automatically remove sensitive data and unusable links during this process.

Your policies, flags, user feedback and all business data are NOT used to train any model.

What languages does the expense policy agent support?

Airwallex Expense policy agent is designed for global teams. It can read receipts and policy documents in multiple languages, not just English.

• If an employee submits a receipt in a foreign language (e.g., French, Chinese, Japanese), your agent will translate and interpret the context to verify compliance.

• All agentic flags will be presented in the language of your user, ensuring you understand the issue regardless of the receipt's origin.

Can I apply different policies to different international entities?

As a global platform, we know that a single policy rarely fits all subsidiaries. You have full flexibility to manage scope:

1. Global baseline: You can own a master policy that applies to "All entities" to verify fundamentals.

2. Entity-specific rules: You can edit different policies for individual entities. This is particularly useful for handling local tax nuances.

3. Local exceptions: If you have a generally global policy with minor local variations, you can use hidden notes to prompt your agent with specific exceptions (e.g., "For Japan employees only, allow taxi expenses after 10 PM").

Follow our dedicated policy editing guide here.

How can I specify exceptions?

You may have "gray areas" or specific context that approvers know, but aren't explicitly written in the employee handbook (e.g., "The $50 dinner limit doesn't apply to the Sales team during client closing week").

You can add Hidden notes to your expense policy agent:

• These notes are only visible to Admins.

• They are never revealed to employees.

• They help your agent make smarter decisions by handling exceptions without cluttering your public policy.

To add a hidden note, use the policy editor: create a new section and transform it to a "hidden note".

Follow our dedicated policy editing guide here.

Can I test a policy before it goes live?

You can control who can access evaluations by your expense policy agent.

While testing a policy, we recommend giving visibility only to Expense admins: your employees and approvers will not see your policy agent and its evaluations.

What does expense policy agent actually check?

Your agent reviews every expense and reimbursement against your company's expense policy, running several checks at once:

• Spending limits: flags amounts that exceed your approved thresholds (per meal, per night, per person, etc.), with automatic currency conversion when needed

• Submission deadlines: flags expenses submitted late according to your policy

• Expense types: flags prohibited categories like personal or entertainment purchases

• Required information: flags missing fields your policy demands, such as business purpose, attendee names, or itemized details

Beyond policy rules, the agent also checks the attachments:

• Amount matching: verifies the receipt matches what was claimed

• Duplicate detection: catches the same receipt submitted twice, even across different reports filed weeks apart

• Receipt verification: confirms receipts cover the full amount, come from the right merchant, and line up with the transaction date

• Merchant consistency (card expenses only): cross-checks the receipt merchant against what the card network recorded

Anything that looks off gets flagged. When everything checks out, your team can focus on the exceptions that truly need attention.

Important: Your existing Airwallex settings (submission deadlines, approval routing, form requirements) always override your agent. 
For example, if hard settings state that receipts are not required under a certain threshold, the agent will forgo receipt verification even if the your policy document says otherwise. 
To get the most out of agentic checks, make sure your form settings match what your policy actually requires.

Does it know how I've configured my expense submission forms?

Absolutely. Whatever you decide about which fields your employees can see and whether they're mandatory — Expense policy agent treats your form setup as the final word. For example, if your written policy says "expense category is required," but you have hidden or made that field optional in the expense form, your policy agent will not flag employees for missing it.

What happens when a field is hidden from employees?

Expense policy agent will never penalize an employee for a field they couldn't see. For checks like "did the employee provide the required info," hidden fields are completely exempt. For checks like spending limits or expense categories, expense policy agent will try to work out the answer from other clues (receipts, descriptions, notes), but if it can't, it gives the employee the benefit of the doubt and passes the expense.

What about fields marked as optional?

Same principle. If an employee leaves an optional field blank, they won't be flagged, even if the policy text says that information is needed. If they do fill it in, expense policy agent evaluates the value normally against your policy rules.

Here is a summary: