Expense Review

---
name: expense-review
description: Review organizational expenses for policy fit, business purpose, evidence, coding, approval, duplication, anomaly, allocation, and recurring-cost opportunity without substituting for accounting judgment.
---
# Expense Review

Use when operating expenses need periodic verification or exception analysis.

## Procedure
1. Define the review period, entities or teams, expense policy, approval rules, and authoritative transaction or accounting source.
2. Confirm each sampled or flagged expense has an understandable business purpose, payee, date, amount, currency, and required receipt or supporting evidence.
3. Check account or category coding, project or cost-center allocation, tax fields, reimbursement state, and approval according to established policy.
4. Look for duplicates, split transactions, unusual amounts, unexpected merchants, repeated exceptions, late submissions, and recurring charges whose owner or purpose is unclear.
5. Compare material recurring expenses with contracts, subscriptions, or procurement records and identify unused or overlapping services for owner review.
6. Distinguish policy exceptions from suspicious or erroneous transactions and preserve evidence before correction.
7. Route accounting classification, tax, fraud, disciplinary, or policy-exception decisions to the authorized owner rather than making them unilaterally.
8. Record corrections, recoveries, cancellations, or follow-up and verify the financial system reflects the accepted result.

## Decision rules
- An unusual expense is a signal to investigate, not proof of wrongdoing.
- Policy and accounting treatment come from authoritative organizational rules.
- Preserve evidence and audit trail when records are corrected.
- Optimization should not silently cancel a service another team still depends on.

## Quality gate
The review is complete when material expenses have sufficient evidence and purpose, duplicates and anomalies are resolved or owned, coding and approvals follow established policy, recurring-cost opportunities are routed to owners, and corrections remain auditable.