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Manage expenses with Expense Agent

APPLIES TO: Business Central online

[This article is prerelease documentation and is subject to change.]

Expense Agent is an AI-powered expense management app that makes it easy for employees to capture receipts, track spending, and submit expense reports in Business Central. Whether you're at your desk or on the go, Expense Agent helps you stay on top of business expenses with minimal effort.

Important

What Expense Agent does

Expense Agent handles the heavy lifting of expense management so you can focus on your work.

  • Receipt scanning — Upload a photo or file of your receipt, and AI detects the merchant, amount, date, and category for you. You review the details and make changes if needed.
  • Mileage expenses — Create mileage expenses directly from the dashboard. Enter your starting point and ending point, and the app calculates the distance and reimbursement amount based on your company's mileage rate.
  • Expense tracking — Keep all your business expenses in one place with full details, attachments, and policy status.
  • Expense reports — Group related expenses into reports and submit them for approval in a few steps.
  • Policy compliance — Business Central checks deterministic rules, and Expense Agent can use AI to evaluate natural-language policies. Administrators configure AI-assisted policy evaluation through Configure Expense Agent assisted setup. Submitters can check draft reports when the action is available, and approvers can review the results.
  • Approval workflows — Approvers can review, approve, or send back expense reports with comments.

Open Expense Agent

To get started, go to Expense Agent in your browser. You can also send receipts by email.

Ways to use Expense Agent

You can work with Expense Agent in three ways:

  • Web app — Open Expense Agent for the full experience. Upload receipts by dragging them onto the Upload receipt (or drop here) area, create and edit expenses, build expense reports, and track approvals.
  • Mobile app — Use the dedicated Expense Agent mobile app on your phone or tablet to capture receipts with your camera, scan multi-page documents, and upload receipts even when offline. Learn more in Use the Expense Agent mobile app.
  • Email — Send receipt photos or PDFs as attachments to your organization's expense mailbox. Expense Agent processes the attachments and creates expenses automatically.

Note

You don't need a Business Central license to use Expense Agent through the web app, email, or Copilot chat. These channels use Copilot credits instead. Learn more in Manage employee expenses.

How expenses flow

Every expense moves through a straightforward lifecycle:

  1. You upload a receipt or create an expense. Expense Agent processes the information and identifies anything that needs your attention.
  2. You review the expense and add it to a draft report.
  3. You submit the report for approval. You can't edit the report while it is under review.
  4. The approver approves the report or sends it back with comments. If the report is sent back, you can correct and resubmit it.

Rule and policy compliance indicators are separate from this workflow. They show whether an expense has an unresolved rule violation, a potential policy issue, or a policy evaluation that isn't current. Learn more in How expense policy and rules compliance work.

Get started with Expense Agent

Ready to dive in? Start with these articles:

Manage employee expenses in Business Central
Use the Expense Agent mobile app
Upload receipts and create expenses in Expense Agent Review and edit expenses in Expense Agent
Create and submit expense reports
Approve or send back expense reports
How expense policy compliance works
Troubleshoot common issues in Expense Agent

Find free e-learning modules for Business Central here

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