Auto-Itemization, is an expense tool that uses AI and ML to itemize receipts in under 60 seconds. Launched in March 2022, resulting in an 87% reduction in time spent on this task—a transformation that revolutionized the expense management industry.
Led end-to-end the user experience of Auto-Itemization. As the sole designer, my role involved conducting user research, performing competitive analysis, ideation, design, countless hours of product testing and bug reporting. I collaborated closely with 1 project manager, 8 engineers, and design leadership.
4 months
Expense submission is a heavily manual process that typically takes around 5 minutes per receipt. Imagine someone returning from a business trip with 20 receipts to submit—it would take them 90 minutes just to complete this task.
The challenge doesn't end there. Finance teams are burdened with reviewing all expenses submitted across the company. The process becomes particularly painful if an employee assigns an expense to the wrong category, requiring back-and-forth communication to clarify the expense. This is likely why people often delay expense submissions by an average of 3 weeks after the actual expense.
Of users submitted the expense to at least 1 wrong category.
Of transactions requires manual itemization by the finance team.
Finance teams needs to close their books every month and every company dollar spent needs to be properly managed. Unfortunately, not all transactions are created equal. Often, a single transaction has multiple parts or line items that need to be reported independently for accounting and tax purposes.
For example, if an employee goes on a business trip and books a hotel for a total of $553 for the entire stay, their transaction will be filed solely as “Lodging” in an accounting system based on a single receipt. However, multiple transactions may be occurring within that total amount that needs to be tracked separately for accounting leaders.
Itemized receipts can also act as a deterrent for employee fraud. Because each item is listed individually, out-of-policy purchases are recognized and denied reimbursement.
The Auto-Itemization feature needs to be versatile enough to handle different scenarios. These can range from simple expense claims, like categorizing meals and alcohol separately during team dinners, to more complex situations such as dividing receipts across multiple projects and clients during business trips.
It's crucial that all these tasks are performed quickly and effortlessly, allowing users to complete itemization in under 2 minutes. The feature should also offer high customization not only for the employee but also for the finance teams.
Leveraging AI, machine learning, and fuzzy matching technology — will auto-categorize the individual line items to specific policies with 90% accuracy. For example, a receipt for a meal could potentially be categorized under different policies like "Meals for Myself," "Per Diem," or "Team Dinner."
We consider several factors including the merchant name, location, total amount, participants, and item names.
This technology also works on an international scale, using language detection and text translation to convert receipts into the preferred language of the finance team.
Why? The receipt is food-related, the employee is not traveling (so it’s not part of the 'Per Diem'), and the number of items and total amount do not qualify as a 'Team Dinner.'
I designed a streamlined interface that organizes items by policy and date, enabling bulk actions like assigning all items to a specific policy, project, or client for billing purposes. Users can also review and modify itemized transactions, with the option to edit any discrepancies before submitting the expense.
Using OCR technology, the receipt is scanned to extract information, while fuzzy matching identifies spelling variations to accurately recognize line items.
The scanning feature was already available in the app, but it only captured high-level details such as date, amount, and business name, without scanning individual line items.
Once a receipt is scanned, each line item is automatically categorized under the appropriate expense policy within seconds.
These items are then grouped by policy and date, giving users a clear, easily navigable view of all applied policies. To address any potential inaccuracies, users can modify any item directly within the tool.
Users can edit details like the title, total amount, and description, or add a specific project number or client name, helping finance teams understand the expense.
To handle this scenario I designed a dynamic contextual menu where users could easily select categories with intuitive names like 'meals' or 'gas'. Once a category was selected, it automatically populated the corresponding policy details and displayed the expense limit within the same interface. This streamlined approach eliminated the need for users to switch between screens to check if the expense was within the spending limit.
Why is this important? Because during user research, people explicitly stated that one of the most time-consuming aspects of the expense report was identifying the correct expense policy.
Until now, finance teams had to manually check the employee’s itemizations or itemize themselves. They’d have to do this with every single receipt that’s been uploaded into their expense management system. This leads to countless follow-ups with the cardholder for additional context, creating a time-consuming and frustrating experience for everyone involved.
This feature increases efficiency for finance admins by removing the need to review transactions. Unless something has been flagged.
Auto-Itemization gives finance teams the ability to view, edit, approve, and reject itemized transactions right within Navan Expense — a process that eliminates a once-painful workflow that used to take hours.
To evaluate the performance and identify any issues, we initially rolled out the feature to Navan employees and five selected companies. This approach allowed us to iterate and refine the feature before a general release.
Auto-itemization not only reduces the time spent on this task for employees and finance teams but also reduced expense submission errors by 42%. Additionally, it has helped our sales team close more deals with companies seeking efficient expense management solutions, helping to increase the company revenue.
Itemization has proven to be an invaluable tool for both employees and companies seeking to manage their expenses efficiently. In addition to receiving media coverage, the feedback from companies using this tool has been overwhelmingly positive.
