When I traveled abroad to the Netherlands and Belgium, I decided not to set a strict budget for myself.
If you’re traveling to Europe for work, to places like Germany, Sweden, Belgium, or the Netherlands, you often have to manage expenses, which can become overwhelming over time. Coffee, airport food, grocery store, train station, restaurant, or hotel receipts can quickly pile up, and before you know it, you’ve gone over budget.
But allow me to play devil’s advocate here and see whether all these fancy business expense tools are really necessary. For my trip, I kept a number in my head for food spending only.
THE BUDGET = €400
THE RULES:
1) Must try out local high-end restaurants for proper cultural enrichment
2) Try out various Cafes at least multiple times a day, since this is a work trip
With just a week and a couple of days, this should be doable, as I’m not including hotels or transportation, just food! It should be enough to experience local foods while staying within budget.
Towards the end of the trip, I’ll collect all of the receipts and analyze my spending habits, where most of the money went, and what I can do differently next time.
The goal in a nutshell
The goal was to use Veryfi to process my receipts, specifically Veryfi Lens. Instead of carrying hundreds of receipts in my pockets, Veryfi Lens lets you know if certain important fields on the receipt weren’t processed properly, so that before you throw it out, you know for sure the receipt was captured properly.
In order to simplify this challenge and not have to carry hundreds of receipts in my pockets and suitcase, Veryfi Lens comes to the rescue. Not only will it extract important fields from the receipt, store the original image on the cloud, but most importantly how it handles “Low Quality Receipts”.
Imagine you’re required to submit your receipts from your work trip for reimbursement, and up until now, you’ve been relying on your phone’s camera to capture these receipts and upload them to whichever platform your organization uses. But what if one day, the receipt you snapped a quick photo of is… not accepted?! Whether it is because it’s blurry, cropped, unreadable, or declined for any other reason, what can you do then? You’ve already thrown away the receipt, so now you’re stuck with a charge on your card that should never have happened.
What if I told you that you can prevent that from EVER happening again? Veryfi Lens does two crucial things:
- It manually adjusts and takes over your phone’s camera to better capture the receipt.
- It will stop to notify you of any errors or unreadable line item fields which would prompt to retake the picture instead of only telling this later like most apps do.
Take a look at a real-time example of how this very same feature helped me when I decided to go to a café right after I arrived at my destination.
It only takes 3 steps to have your receipt safe and sound in the cloud!
Notice how the scanned receipt is barely visible, and the ink is practically fading away as you’re reading it?! Well, in the second image, you can see that Veryfi Lens confirms that it detected the most important fields, and the extracted data appears in the third image.
Anyway, back to the trip. The first stop was in Amsterdam, a beautiful city with a combination of modernism and historical landmarks. But let’s take a closer look at the prices. If you’re from anywhere in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, or New York, high prices no longer faze you. Therefore, I hypothesize that this challenge of keeping a mental note of my business spending abroad should be a walk in the park.
According to common per diem-style travel benchmarks, my €400 for food only is very much within budget/reasonable parameters so there shouldn’t be a reason why I can’t complete this challenge successfully!
When I selected all of the receipts scanned using Veryfi Lens in The Vault, the results were absolutely shocking.
This was…far too beyond budget…
Initial Budget = €400 | Actual Amount = €594
€194 over budget. I suppose such a challenge should only be attempted if you’re experienced at budgeting. Perception of costs and spending often goes out the window when traveling abroad with a set budget, especially if that money doesn’t come out of your pocket.
Here you can see one of Vault’s insights showcasing the cost of each item, its amount, the collective total, as well as the number of receipts/documents processed. Fortunately, these Veryfi insights have told me a few things about my spending habits:
- I tend to spend THE most in the beginning of the trip (BIG RED FLAG)
- My biggest expenses aren’t even restaurants, but rather CAFÉS, ironic
The fact that Veryfi takes all of those receipts and turns them into clean, structured data can be a game changer for anyone traveling abroad for business. Instead of manually typing every merchant, date, total, tax, currency, and line item into a spreadsheet, Veryfi can extract that information automatically and make it usable inside expense management, accounting, reimbursement, or reporting workflows.
But let’s say your expense platform already has data extraction. Veryfi also offers numerous tools and over 50 different APIs for specific use cases. Not only that, but you also receive a top-of-the-line fraud detection suite in case some of your employees decide to manipulate their receipts to receive “extra” compensation during their work trip. Let me break down how easily expense workflows can be abused:
Receipt Manipulation
Let’s take one of my receipts from the trip and another one which was edited:
Both of these receipts are identical. The only differences are the octopus item and the total amount. If I were to submit the edited receipt as a business expense from a dinner with a client, it could get reimbursed, and a whole scheme could be born out of this.
Thanks to this trip and thanks to Veryfi, I was able to understand that without a system in place, I’m not to be trusted with trip budgets, whether with family, friends, or alone!
If you’re interested in learning more about our tools, API integrations, and apps, check out this page → Why Veryfi
