Drafts a clear, enforceable expense and approval policy – per-category spend limits, a dollar-tiered approval matrix, receipt and documentation rules, 30/90-day submission deadlines, and audit sampling.
Drafts a clear, enforceable expense and approval policy - per-category spend limits, a dollar-tiered approval matrix, receipt and documentation rules, 30/90-day submission deadlines, and audit sampling. Use when someone says "write our expense policy", "who should approve what spend", "set reimbursement rules", or is onboarding a finance system or preparing for a compliance review. Do NOT use for building a departmental or personal budget - use budget-builder instead; do NOT use for the monthly close checklist - use month-end-close instead; do NOT use for general internal SOPs outside spend - use process-doc instead.This is the skill's description: the text your AI reads to decide when the skill applies.
expense-policy/SKILL.md
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name: Expense and Approval Policy
description: Drafts a clear, enforceable expense and approval policy - per-category spend limits, a dollar-tiered approval matrix, receipt and documentation rules, 30/90-day submission deadlines, and audit sampling. Use when someone says "write our expense policy", "who should approve what spend", "set reimbursement rules", or is onboarding a finance system or preparing for a compliance review. Do NOT use for building a departmental or personal budget - use budget-builder instead; do NOT use for the monthly close checklist - use month-end-close instead; do NOT use for general internal SOPs outside spend - use process-doc instead.
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# Expense and Approval Policy
An expense policy that employees ignore is worse than no policy - it creates a false sense of control while spend leaks through exceptions. A good policy is short enough to read, specific enough to apply, and enforced consistently; the costly mistake this skill prevents is the prose-heavy policy nobody can apply at the moment of purchase, which converts every expense into a judgment call and every judgment call into precedent.
## Operating procedure
Order matters: limits must be calibrated to the company before the approval matrix is drawn, or the tiers will not match how spend actually flows.
1. Collect the inputs below.
2. Draft the five mandatory sections in order: what is reimbursable, spend limits by category, approval authority by amount, documentation requirements, submission deadlines. Each section is a table or short bulleted list - never prose paragraphs. An employee must be able to scan to any answer in under 30 seconds.
3. Calibrate the default numbers below to the company's size, geography, and travel intensity. Keep the structure even where the numbers move.
4. Add the enforcement section - a policy without stated consequences is a suggestion.
5. Close the catch-all: anything not listed is not reimbursable without explicit pre-approval.
6. Route the draft to finance and legal for sign-off before publication, and pair with the expense-tool configuration so approval tiers are enforced in software, not memory.
### Step 1: gather inputs
- Company headcount and typical approver chain (who exists between employee and CFO).
- Travel intensity: domestic vs international mix, typical destinations (sets the hotel cap - default to the median business-hotel rate in each frequent city).
- Existing pain points: which categories currently leak (default guess: meals, software subscriptions, and late submissions - label this a guess until finance confirms).Click to play with sound.