Slack pre-submit expense what-if bot

Gives employees a conversational way to sanity-check a purchase against company expense policy before they spend a dollar. They message the bot in plain language ("$280 dinner for 4 with a client in NYC"), and it replies with a clear reimbursable / partially reimbursable / not covered verdict, the per-head or category cap that applies, and the exact documentation they'll need at submission time.

Deploy when employees keep asking finance "will this get approved?" in DMs, or when out-of-policy submissions are clogging the approval queue. It shifts the policy question to the moment of decision instead of the moment of reimbursement.

1. 1An employee mentions the bot or DMs it in Slack with a free-text purchase description.
2. 2The agent fetches the current expense-policy rules and category caps from an Airtable base.
3. 3It reasons over the description against those rules to classify the spend and compute the allowed amount.
4. 4A logic branch splits clean, capped, and out-of-policy outcomes into tailored guidance.
5. 5The bot replies in-thread with the verdict, the cap, required receipts/approver, and a one-line policy citation.