Cash Advance & Settle: Stop Losing Track of Outstanding Travel Advances

The problem this kills

A cash advance is a promise that someone will account for the money later. Too often, "later" never quite comes. Finance wires $2,000 to an employee heading into the field, the trip happens, a few receipts trickle in by email, and then the advance just... sits there. Six months on, nobody can say whether the employee still owes the company money, whether the company owes them, or whether it was ever squared up at all.

The mess comes from the gap between two events that almost never live in the same place: the money you paid out, and the receipts that came back. The advance lives in a payment system. The receipts live in an inbox or a shoebox. The reconciliation lives in someone's head until quarter-end forces a painful spreadsheet archaeology session — and outstanding advances quietly pile up as an unmanaged liability on your books.

You don't need a six-figure travel-and-expense suite to fix this, and you don't need to be a developer. You need one place that ties the advance to its settlement, does the arithmetic, ages anything that's gone stale, and won't let money move until a person signs off.

What you'll build

A small, secure internal web app that runs the full advance lifecycle:

• An employee requests an advance (amount, purpose, trip dates), and a manager approves or declines it.
• You record the advance as paid, and from that moment it's an open liability the tool tracks and ages.
• After the trip, the employee submits actual expenses with receipt images attached.
• The tool computes the settlement balance automatically: if they spent less than the advance, the employee owes a refund; if they spent more, the company owes a top-up.
• Finance reviews the actuals and the computed balance, then approves the settlement — the only point at which money is cleared to move.
• The tool exports a clean payroll/AP CSV (a recover line or a reimburse line) in exactly the columns your system expects, and marks the advance closed.

It handles the real-world wrinkles too: a dashboard of open advances with aging so overdue settlements get flagged, optional currency handling for international trips, and duplicate guards so the same advance can't be paid or settled twice.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single file you paste into an AI coding agent. It doesn't hand you a generic template — it opens by interviewing you about your business so the tool fits how you actually run advances: your real approval chain, your expense categories, your payroll/AP import format, your currencies, and your own messy exceptions (partial settlements, lost receipts, advances that span two trips). It reflects a short spec back to you, gets your thumbs-up, and only then starts building.

Inside you'll find:

• The discovery interview, with concrete questions tailored to advances and settlements.
• A step-by-step build, each step ending in a ready-to-paste prompt — no guesswork about what to type next.
• The data model for advances, actual expenses, and settlements, shaped by your answers.
• The settlement math and the recover-vs-reimburse logic.
• Receipt upload, the aging dashboard, and overdue flagging.
• The payroll/AP CSV export, plus a No-API fallback so the whole thing works today even if you can't yet connect to your accounting system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a free-for-all expense app. The plan builds in the controls finance actually needs:

• Login so only your team can use the tool.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own advances and people only see what they're entitled to.
• A complete audit trail — who requested, who approved, who settled, and exactly when.
• Two human approval gates: a manager approves the advance up front, and finance approves the final settlement. No money is ever cleared to move without a person signing off.
• Duplicate guards keyed on employee + advance ID, so the same advance can't be paid out or settled twice.

Who it's for

Finance and AP teams that issue advances for travel or field purchases and keep losing the thread on what was actually spent. If you're the person who chases receipts, reconciles advances at quarter-end, and quietly worries about how much is still outstanding, this is for you.

You've got this — paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.