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🀚 How do we handle duplicate requests on Spendesk?
🀚 How do we handle duplicate requests on Spendesk?

Which duplicates do we send a warning on?

Updated over a week ago

Requesters and Finance teams... Now is your time to make sure that you never upload the same expense twice! 😇

Expense claims duplicates

Expense claims duplicate flagging can happen this way:

  • If the Requester submits the same expense claims twice.

  • If the Requester submits an expense claim similar to a payment he's already made with his Spendesk physical card.

  • If the Requester submits a receipt that has already been uploaded by them.

The different checks our tool makes are on:

  • the receipt

  • date+amount+supplier

  • date+amount (if the supplier has not been filled or detected)

🔥 If the Requester submits the expense even though it's a duplicate, the Controller is warned on the request.

🔥 If the Requester submits the expense another user has already submitted, the link to the previous (equivalent) request is displayed.

Invoice duplicates

As a Requester, I want to avoid submitting the same invoice several times. As a Controller, I want to make sure I don't pay the same supplier twice!

This is why we flag invoice duplicates.

Requesters

When Requesters submit an invoice that has already been submitted (i.e the same file or same supplier + invoice number), then they immediately get a warning at the bottom of the request panel, and can either delete the invoice or submit it anyway.

What do we check?

The document added by the users and information it contains.

Technical details

To detect duplicates, there are two checks:

  1. An algorithm called checksum is applied on the file. This extracts a value that represents the number of bits in the document meaning that two exact same documents will have the same checksum, but if they differ by even one bit the checksum's different (more info on checksums here).

  2. the 2d check is to see if there’s a match on supplier & invoice number for already submitted invoices. This is dependent on the OCR extraction (because the OCR extraction gives us the supplier & invoice number from the file).

If there’s a match in step 1 or step 2 then we show the "duplicate detected "panel on the draft request:

Controllers

If a Controller reviews an invoice that has already been reviewed, they get a warning so as to reject it and to avoid paying it twice. Only receipts added as invoices previously are flagged to the Controller.

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