Expense management

Overview

Expense management lets you offer expense tracking and approval to your customers. Transactions are matched to an uploaded receipt, and then move through each customer’s approval workflow—categorized and readied for export to their accounting system. The setup has two parts. First, your system pushes transactions into Tesouro (typically from a card feed). Then your customer’s admin configures the rules—what employees must provide before submitting, who needs to approve, and how expenses map to their chart of accounts. Once setup is complete, employees can upload receipts and submit expenses for approval. Note: Tesouro currently accepts transactions from an external feed. Native card support is on the roadmap.

Key concepts

Concept	What it is
Transaction	An expense event uploaded from a card feed or created directly via API — the central object everything else attaches to.
Expense status	The approval lifecycle state of a transaction: `new`, `approve_in_progress`, `approved`, `rejected`, or `canceled`. Separate from `payment_processing_status`, which tracks the card transaction itself.
Receipt	A PDF, PNG, or JPEG file representing proof of purchase. Receipts are matched to transactions and can be uploaded directly, scanned from a mobile device, or forwarded by email.
Approval policy	A rule that specifies which transactions require approval and who must approve them. Policies are evaluated automatically when a transaction is submitted.
Approval	The act of an authorized user accepting or rejecting a submitted transaction. Without an applicable policy, an admin can approve a transaction directly — useful when an employee’s reporting manager is not set or unavailable.

Expense status lifecycle

Each transaction carries an expense_status field that moves through the following states:

Transition	Trigger	API endpoint
→ `new`	Transaction created	`POST /transactions`
`new` → `approve_in_progress`	Employee submits for approval	`POST /transactions/{id}/submit`
`approve_in_progress` → `approved`	Approver approves	`POST /transactions/{id}/approve`
`approve_in_progress` → `rejected`	Approver rejects	`POST /transactions/{id}/reject`
`rejected` → `new`	Employee reopens after rejection	`POST /transactions/{id}/reopen`
`new` → `canceled`	Transaction canceled	`POST /transactions/{id}/cancel`
`approve_in_progress` → `canceled`	Transaction canceled while awaiting approval	`POST /transactions/{id}/cancel`

expense_status tracks the approval workflow. payment_processing_status tracks the card payment lifecycle (created, processing, succeeded, declined, refunded, failed). Both fields appear on every transaction response.

What’s next

Setup

Configure the transaction feed, validation requirements, approval policies, and accounting fields. Run this once per organization.

Expense lifecycle

Follow the runtime flow for each expense: auto-categorization, employee submission, approval, and accounting field mapping.

Receipts & OCR

Upload paths, AI auto-matching, the receipt bank, and how the source_of_data field tracks receipt provenance.

Getting started

Embedded components

Authentication

Roles & permissions

Manage organizations

Common objects

Accounts payable

Accounts receivable