Turn a receipt into a construction project expense with Alfie after review

A receipt photographed from a van contains evidence, not a complete project expense. The supplier may be unclear, VAT may be mixed, and several active sites may fit the purchase. Alfie can extract a proposal, but the company needs to resolve ownership, project allocation and duplicate risk before an expense is created.

Capture the source without losing context

Keep the original image, transaction date, submitter and stated purpose. Ask which project and work package benefited from the purchase. A shop location or employee name is not enough to infer a site.

Check whether the same receipt arrived through email, an expense app or a card feed. Use supplier, date, total and reference together for duplicate detection; image filenames are unreliable identifiers.

Review extracted financial fields

Compare supplier identity, receipt number, date, net amount, VAT amount, rate and total against the image. Mixed-rate or incomplete receipts stay in exception review. Do not treat a plausible OCR value as tax evidence.

Choose the cost category and project only after the purchase purpose is known. Personal or non-project items require the company's separate policy rather than a convenient miscellaneous code.

Confirm the governed expense action

The preview should show the source beside every proposed field, the target project, category, duplicate signals and resulting total. Alfie interprets the request, while Enfin remains the governed execution layer. The current action catalogue defines what can be done, organisation context limits which records are visible, and a preview makes the real effect reviewable. The model does not receive independent authority to change company data. Missing or conflicting evidence should stop the flow for clarification.

The model performs interpretation; Enfin applies permissions and writes only the confirmed business record. This flow does not claim autonomous bookkeeping or a specific model-provider integration.

Retain evidence and resolve exceptions

After creation, link the expense to the receipt and card or bank transaction when available. Give missing evidence an owner and due date. Review rejected proposals so recurring supplier or project-matching problems can be fixed upstream.

See the general expense management guide for contractors and Alfie in Enfin for the controlled document-to-record layer.

Final control before closure. For “Turn a receipt into a construction project expense with Alfie after review”, review four points together. Is the source current and attached to the correct customer, quote, invoice or project? Does the user have authority for this exact change? Are uncertain fields, conflicts and missing evidence still visible? Does the result name an owner for the next step? Record exceptions in the business file, not only in a separate conversation. Another colleague should be able to distinguish what was proposed, what was confirmed and what was deliberately left unknown. Test the flow with a wrong record, a duplicate document and a withdrawn instruction as well. A governed action should stop before execution in each case and let the user correct the proposal safely.