GBTA panel: Why travel reconciliation fails and how to fix it

Travel reconciliation rarely breaks in a single dramatic collapse. It breaks through small, compounding gaps.

An off-platform airline booking. A flat $250 hotel cap that makes it impossible to find an in-policy hotel in New York City. A lost tax receipt from a European trip. An unitemized hotel folio that combines parking, room rate, and room service into one lump sum.

Each issue is manageable on its own. Together, they transform month-end close into a weeks-long forensic audit.

When I moderated a recent GBTA education session titled “Death by a Thousand Cuts: Fixing Travel Reconciliation,” our panel confronted these exact pain points. I was joined by industry leaders who brought diverse practitioner perspectives:

• Ashley Clay, Global Travel Manager, Shaw Industries
• Randy Luck, Senior Manager Accounts Payable & Travel, Ancestry
• Cher Keck, Head of B2B Fintech Partnerships, North America, Visa

The collective verdict: Travel programs do not fail because employees want to break rules. They fail when the approved booking path is impractically rigid.

Above (left to right): Panelists Clay, Luck, Keck, and me.

Fixing reconciliation isn't about stricter policing after the fact. The real takeaway is making compliance the easy, natural choice. That happens when policies are built with the traveler in mind and the teams receiving that data are consulted from day one. When you pair that aligned foundation with real-time spend capture and targeted AI automation, routine processing vanishes and managers can focus on true exceptions.

Fixing reconciliation requires capturing spend context at the moment of booking, making the compliant choice the easy choice, and deploying AI to handle routine processing so people can evaluate real exceptions.

Make policy work in the real world

Expense policies fail when they are treated as static legal documents stored in employee handbooks. Travelers do not cross-reference a PDF while booking a flight or hotel; they choose the option that fits their immediate operational reality.

When a travel policy specifies a flat $200 lodging cap, that rule breaks down immediately in high-cost metro markets. A traveler heading to Manhattan or London cannot find a compliant hotel near their office at that price. They book off-platform, pay with a personal credit card, and leave the travel manager with zero visibility into duty of care or itinerary data.

To fix off-platform booking leakage, travel managers must move from static enforcement to dynamic policy design:

• Implement dynamic spend limits: Adjust lodging thresholds automatically using real-time market rate data for specific cities and dates.
• Identify the root cause of leakage: Before penalizing repeat off-platform bookers, investigate why they left the tool. Are mandatory inventory options missing? Is the booking interface frustrating?
• Address event-driven surges: Large industry conferences trigger sudden rate spikes and inventory shortages. Utilizing centralized group bookings for major events keeps attendees in-policy without triggering individual cap breaches.
• Build compliance into the booking flow: Display policy boundaries directly inside the search interface so employees see compliant choices instantly without manual checks.

When the approved path is also the most practical choice, compliance rises naturally. Organizations using real-time policy controls and dynamic caps can see significant drops in off-platform leakage.

Put AI to work on the routine

Manual expense audits consume valuable finance capacity. According to a study by Forrester Consulting, legacy manual expense management processes sink dozens of hours into auditing compliant receipts, tracking down line items, and resolving minor coding errors.

During the panel, a clear framework emerged for evaluating artificial intelligence in expense workflows: If you had an army of overeager interns, what routine tasks would you hand off to them first?

The goal of AI in T&E is not to remove human judgment or establish blind trust. It is to reduce noise.

Automate touchless approvals

Route standard, in-policy expenses straight to accounting systems without manual manager sign-off. Luck mentioned that at Ancestry, pairing automated policy checks with AI tools reduced expense audit rates from 100% down to 30%, freeing up significant administrative capacity.

Synthesize exception context

Instead of sending raw line items to a manager, AI tools can review transaction anomalies, summarize why an item exceeds threshold, and recommend approval or denial based on historical context.

Streamline offboarding card audits

Cross-reference employee offboarding lists against open corporate card accounts and outstanding expense reports to generate targeted action lists instantly.

This division of labor keeps human reviewers focused where they add value: evaluating edge cases, identifying policy adjustments, and managing vendor relationships.

Capture spend data before it becomes a cleanup problem

Waiting until month-end to collect receipts turns reconciliation into a forensic exercise. A missing receipt or unitemized hotel folio forces finance teams to send repeated reminder emails while charges sit unallocated on corporate ledger sheets.

During our discussion and the Q&A that followed, we kept returning to one core takeaway: Fixing this requires finance teams to shift from a traditional expense report mindset to a real-time transaction mindset. Capturing and processing spend instantaneously at the point of purchase fundamentally changes how finance leaders analyze and control company spend. Instead of compiling a massive batch report at the end of the month, a traveler can go out to dinner, snap a photo of the receipt, have it automatically coded, and be done on the spot.

On the administrative side, pairing clear policy controls with automated AI reviews transforms the workload. Luck explained how this improved reconciliation at Ancestry: Where previously they had to review 100% of incoming expense reports manually, deploying intelligent review tools now allows up to 70% of transactions to go straight through fully touchless.

Moving from reactive audits to real-time reconciliation requires capturing spend data the moment it happens:

• Shift to per-transaction submission: Submit and process each transaction individually at the point of sale rather than batching them into bulky month-end expense reports.
• Leverage direct e-receipt integrations: Enable direct digital connections with hotel loyalty accounts, airlines, and car rental providers to pull folio data automatically into the expense platform.
• Deploy automated AI policy reviews: Use AI to automatically check and clear compliant, in-policy transactions instant-by-instant, reserving manual review exclusively for edge cases.
• Separate one-off losses from habitual patterns: Distinguish between a traveler who occasionally loses an out-of-pocket taxi slip and an employee who systematically bypasses receipt requirements, then align with accounting teams on what actually meets the threshold for manual review.
• Deploy automated email ingestion: Empower employees to set auto-forwarding rules or use intelligent inbox scanners that parse vendor receipts from email confirmations as soon as they land in the inbox. (This will be available for Navan customers to opt into very soon.)

Every missing data point represents another small cut to operational efficiency. Capturing clean, structured data upstream eliminates the need for manual cleanup downstream.

Hotel itemization: Progress with a reality check

When the panel polled the audience on their single biggest expense headache, the answer was immediate and unanimous: hotel folio itemization.

A single hotel bill routinely combines room rates, local occupancy taxes, resort fees, parking, and restaurant meals onto one sheet. For finance teams, splitting these charges into correct General Ledger (GL) accounts is a major bottleneck.

While optical character recognition (OCR) and machine learning tools have advanced significantly, hotel folios remain notoriously inconsistent across global chains and independent boutique properties.

This reality prompted an essential warning from the panel: when automation is introduced, travelers may assume the system is infallible and submit populated fields without reviewing them.

Modern automation tools must break down complex folios automatically while providing clear, visual confirmation prompts for the user. The goal is not blind trust; it is making verification fast and effortless.

Stop the bleeding before month-end

Reconciliation does not need to be a month-end crisis. The path to cleaner books requires a fundamental shift: moving away from end-of-quarter expense reports and toward real-time, transaction-based spend management.

By implementing dynamic policies, real-time data capture, and AI tools that filter out routine noise, travel managers can build a program that prevents reconciliation errors before they happen.

Ready to eliminate reconciliation friction and regain total visibility over your business spend?

Book a demo with Navan today to see how our unified travel and expense platform automates spend from swipe to reconciliation.