Cross-FunctionalFinance
Expense questions. Answered, and cited.
Answers employee questions about expense, travel, and budget approval policy directly in chat, every answer cited to the specific policy section — escalating genuinely complex cases to finance. Built for finance teams fielding hundreds of policy questions a month.
Answers cited to policy, in seconds. Built on Sphere AI Foundry.
expense_qa — query #EX-71102LIVE
00:00Ingest → question: per diem rate for international travelread
00:02Search → travel & expense policy, current versionpassed
00:03Match → per diem varies by destination tierpassed
00:04Cross-check → destination not in standard tier listflagged
00:05Answer → cited response returnedsealed
response time 4ssources cited 1/1finance review optional
Built on Sphere AI Foundry·Answers cited to your policy·21 years, 300+ clients
Policy questions don't scale with headcount growth
A single expense question means an employee messaging finance and waiting for someone to check the travel and expense policy — a policy that gets updated more often than most employees notice. At low volume that's manageable. Across hundreds of questions a month, it's the reason finance spends half its time answering the same per diem question instead of closing the books.
88%
faster answer vs. waiting on finance
1
policy citation per answer, on average
100%
of answers traceable to the current policy section
Question in, cited answer out
Four steps, every one logged and citable back to your policy.
01
Ingest
Reads the question directly from your systems
A plain-language expense or budget question — asked from Slack, Teams, or your expense platform. No separate upload step.
Example query
"What's the per diem rate for international travel?"
02
Search your policy
Searches the current expense and travel policy
The current travel and expense policy, plus any recent budget-approval updates — searched together, not from a stale cached copy.
Cross-reference
Cross-referencing Travel & Expense Policy, per diem tier table
03
Cite every answer
No answer without a citation
Each answer links back to the exact policy section it came from — the citation travels with the answer, not as a separate lookup.
Cited finding
Per diem varies by destination tier — this destination isn't in the standard tier list and needs a finance confirmation.
cited to Travel & Expense Policy §5.2, per diem tier table04
Classify & route
One answer, flagged when policy is unclear
The agent returns a direct answer when policy is clear, or flags a gap or edge case for finance to confirm before the employee books or submits.
Classification
Answer confirmedNeeds finance confirmation ✓Escalate to finance
10 fields, every one cited
What the agent returns with every answer.
Answer summary & confidence flag
Source citation (policy section)
Expense category or budget line context
Approval-threshold check
Recent policy-change flag
Escalation recommendation
Prior related-question history
Response draft
Policy version & effective date
Finance review checklist
Typical inputs
What the agent reads, and what it connects to.
Documents
- Travel and expense policy
- Budget approval thresholds and delegation-of-authority matrix
- Recent policy updates and bulletins
Systems
- Chat platform (Slack/Teams)
- Expense management platform
- Document repository or knowledge base
Is this the right fit?
Built for volume — not a one-off question.
✓ Works best for
- Finance teams fielding 50+ policy questions a month
- Organizations with a documented, current expense policy
- Finance wanting every answer traceable to the policy
Too small for
- A single edge-case question finance can answer faster than configuring the search
- Replacing finance judgment on a genuinely novel exception
- Policies that are undocumented or significantly out of date
Grounded in your policy, not a black box
Compliance-first, the same standard every Sphere agent is held to.
The agent answers only from your current expense and budget policy — it flags a gap or edge case rather than guessing when policy is unclear. Every answer sits between an employee question and finance review, never past it without judgment on genuinely novel cases.
Answers reference the specific policy section and effective date directly — the same audit-trail standard every Sphere agent on the Foundry is held to.
Prerequisites current policy connected
Current expense and budget policy must be connected before the agent will answer with confidence.
Human review optional
Finance reviews escalated or novel questions — direct answers grounded in current policy need no sign-off.
Source grounding policy-cited
Answers reference the specific policy section and effective date directly in every response.
Foundation Sphere AI Foundry
Access controls and audit trail configured here carry forward to every other agent you deploy.
Frequently asked
Does the Expense & Budget Policy Agent approve expenses?
No. It answers policy questions so employees know the rule before submitting — your existing approval workflow is unchanged.
What topics does it cover?
Travel, expense, and budget approval policy out of the box. Additional policy areas can be added during onboarding.
How does it integrate with our chat platform?
It reads directly from Slack, Teams, or your expense platform — no separate upload step required. Integration scope is confirmed during deployment planning.
Is every answer traceable to our actual policy?
Yes. Every answer cites the specific policy section it came from — there is no answer without a citation back to the source.
How is this different from a generic FAQ bot?
It cross-checks against recent policy updates so employees never get a stale answer, not a static FAQ list. It runs on Sphere AI Foundry, so the access controls and audit trail configured here carry forward to other agents you deploy.
Start here
See it on your own policy questions
Bring three real expense or budget questions to the demo. We'll show the cited answer live — sources, citations, and any escalation flags.
Looking for a different workflow? Browse the full Agent Catalog.
Talk to a solutions architect
Direct to a senior architect — never a sales queue. Replies within one business day.
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