The one purchase your controls cannot prevent.
Every procurement control assumes the purchase has not happened yet. A claim is reported after the money has gone, leaving evidence, policy and somebody reading it. Atlas treats a claim as what it is — a debt the organisation owes an employee.
Claim, receipt, policy, approval, payable, paid.
An employee raises a claim, a receipt on each line. It runs the real delegation schedule — the same named levels and bands as a requisition, not a weaker ladder. Approved, it becomes a payable to that person and settles in the ordinary payment run.
- Why a payableThe organisation genuinely owes that person money. Recording it as anything else hides a real liability
- Same ladderApproval uses the delegation schedule you already configured, so a claim cannot be a quiet route around your own thresholds
- PaidMarked paid here because the accounts say it was paid — never the other way round
- Off by defaultAn expense claim is a second way money leaves the organisation. A workspace that has not bought it is not shown a route that bypasses the buying controls
It refuses rather than guesses.
Mileage and per diem are not typed in. Atlas calculates them from the published rate in force on the date of the expense, and records which rate it used. Holding no rate for that date, it REFUSES the line.
- Why refuseEvery other design produces a number, and a number cannot be told from a correct one. A rate quietly a year out of date pays the wrong amount to everybody, for a year
- DatedRates carry the dates they apply from, so a claim for last quarter uses last quarter's rate
- Expired vs unconfirmedReported separately. One national mileage rate has not moved since 2011 — 'unchanged' is not evidence anybody looked
- RecordedThe rate used is stored on the line, so a claim can be re-checked years later without reconstructing what the rate was
Held, hashed, and never read by us.
A receipt is stored against its line as evidence for the approver. Atlas does not read it, does not scan it, and connects to no bank feed or card feed of any kind.
- No OCRNothing extracts figures from your receipts
- No card feedsAtlas does not connect to a bank or card account. It cannot see what you spent; it sees what you claimed
- AccessReceipts are not readable by colleagues at large
- DuplicatesA receipt attached twice is matched on its content, so the same file under a different name is still recognised
It lands in the ledger like anything else.
An approved claim is pushed to the connected accounting system as a payable to the employee. It is coded to the account and cost centre the claimant chose and the approver accepted.
- CodedAccount and cost centre on every line, matched to your own chart
- PostedThrough the same connector, the same idempotency key and the same period check as a supplier invoice
- HonestWhere a ledger will not let Atlas create the employee as a supplier safely, it says so and asks you to create and map the record, rather than a half-formed one that cannot be paid
- NeverA payment instruction. Atlas does not move money, for a claim any more than for an invoice