Glossary

Expense report control, referred to in France as contrôle des Notes de Frais (NDF), is the process of verifying that employee expense claims are justified, compliant with company policy, correctly categorized, and free of duplicates or ineligible items before reimbursement is processed. It sits at the intersection of internal controls, cash management, and employee trust.

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In most organizations, expense report control is either non-existent or sampling-based: a manager approves reports that look reasonable, an accountant spot-checks a subset, and the vast majority are processed without systematic review. The consequence is predictable: duplicate receipts, personal expenses submitted as professional, policy thresholds exceeded without challenge, and VAT recovery missed on eligible claims.

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At scale, these individually small issues accumulate into a material compliance and cash loss. A company with 50 employees submitting monthly expense reports, each containing one unchallenged personal item of €25, is absorbing €15,000 per year in unjustified reimbursements, silently, because no one is checking 100% of claims.

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Phacet's expense management control capabilities apply systematic, rule-based verification on every expense report line: checking against per diem policy limits, detecting duplicate receipts, flagging receipts without VAT numbers for recovery purposes, and identifying claims outside approved categories. Every flagged item becomes an exception for human review, so the team stops validating everything and starts only reviewing what's anomalous.

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Combined with pre-payment controls on the full AP cycle, NDF automation ensures that continuous finance control extends to employee-initiated spending, not just supplier invoices. The audit trail on every decision makes compliance demonstrable rather than assumed.