Expense reports: tax rules, CSR, digitisation

The legislation governing expense reports is complex and keeps changing. Today, the French tax authority and URSSAF ask for stronger proof of professional expenses. An expense report must meet three basic conditions to be tax-deductible and to let you recover its VAT. The expense must be made in the direct interest of the business. It must be backed by a valid invoice or receipt. And it must not be excessive.^[1]

The 2023 reform stressed a clear line between strictly business expenses and those that could be treated as benefits in kind. This mainly concerns the most common categories: mileage reimbursement, meal expenses and accommodation costs.

Tax rules require great care in how you collect and present supporting documents. To be valid, each receipt must show the supplier's name and the date of the expense. It must describe the goods or services precisely (e.g. "Business meal" rather than simply "Restaurant"). It must also show the net amount excluding VAT, the VAT rate and amount, and the gross amount including VAT. For business meals, you must also record the names of guests and their companies.

If any of these details is missing, the deduction can be rejected during a URSSAF audit.^[2] With poor documents, the tax authority can refuse the expense. It can also treat it as a benefit in kind. The company then owes extra social security contributions, and the employee owes income tax on it. This is a significant financial and legal risk.

This is exactly where tools like Greenway become essential. The app uses OCR technology (Optical Character Recognition) to scan the receipt. It extracts all the relevant data and fills in the required fields automatically. This cuts the risk of human error to almost zero.

To apply expense report regulations with confidence, you need to know the details of each spending category:

• Mileage expenses: When employees use their own vehicle for business travel, the official mileage reimbursement scale sets what they are paid back. The tax authority publishes it every year. The scale depends on the vehicle's engine rating and the number of kilometres driven. Any payment above the scale is subject to social security contributions. For company vehicles, the question does not arise: a fuel card pays for the fuel directly, with no out-of-pocket spending and no scale to apply.
• Meal expenses: Meal costs are deductible during a business trip that stops the employee from going home or to their usual workplace. The meal allowance exemption threshold is €20.70.^[3] Above this amount, the expense must be justified in detail. For business meals with clients or partners, the tax authority judges case by case whether the cost is "non-excessive".
• Accommodation expenses: When travelling more than 50 km from home, hotel costs are fully deductible, provided they are not deemed "lavish". A detailed invoice is mandatory.

The paperless expense report is the biggest step forward of recent years. Modern digital tools, such as the Greenway mobile app, change a process that used to be slow and frustrating. The idea is simple. As soon as an employee spends money, they take a photo of the receipt. OCR technology reads the image and extracts the data (amount, VAT, supplier, date). Then artificial intelligence sorts the expense into a category (transport, restaurant, hotel, etc.).

The expense report is created in seconds, ready to submit for approval. This real-time process ends forgotten receipts and lost tickets. It also ends long data-entry sessions at the end of the month. The manager gets a notification. They can check the expense against the company's expense policy, which is built into the tool, and approve it in one click.

For a long time, the legal status of digital receipts held back the move to paperless. The decree of 23 May 2023 strengthened the order of 22 March 2017 and removed all doubt. A digital receipt now has the same legal value as the paper original, as long as it meets strict standards for scanning and storage.^[4] This process is called legally compliant archiving. It guarantees that the digital document is complete, authentic and durable.

Tools like the Greenway portal include a certified digital vault. It stores receipts securely for the 10 years the law requires. Businesses can then get rid of their bulky paper archives with complete peace of mind. They free up physical space and find documents more easily during audits. This gives a level of traceability never seen before and makes audits much simpler.

Automation saves significant time and money, and the whole organisation feels it:

• For employees: No more end-of-month admin chores. Submitting an expense report takes less than a minute. Reimbursements are faster, which improves employee satisfaction and wellbeing.
• For managers: The approval workflow is simpler. They see their team's expenses clearly and can approve them on the go, without holding up the process.
• For finance and accounting teams: This is a real revolution. Manual data entry, which causes errors and wastes time, disappears. Data is reliable and structured. It feeds automatically into the accounting software (Sage, Cegid, SAP, etc.). Companies with a dedicated expense management solution typically save 30 to 40 hours per month. They also cut data-entry errors by as much as 75%.^[5]

Today, financial results alone no longer define business performance. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a strategic pillar. It shapes a company's reputation, its employer brand and even its access to financing. Expense reports capture a large share of day-to-day activity (travel, purchases, etc.). This makes them an ideal place to build in and measure this commitment in concrete terms.

Businesses can now map their spending by its environmental and social impact. This data is crucial for sustainability reporting. Under the new European CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive), this reporting becomes mandatory from 2025 for companies with more than 250 employees.^[6] Companies that do not prepare for this deadline face a real risk of non-compliance.

How does this work in practice? The Greenway app, true to its name, goes beyond simple financial management. Every expense receives a carbon estimate based on the merchant's category (EV charging excepted). It is not a trip-by-trip calculation but an order of magnitude per expense, which then adds up in your reporting. To compare a train and a flight on the same route, ADEME's public Base Carbone emission factors remain the reference.^[7] This feature lets businesses:

• Raise awareness among employees about the impact of their travel choices.
• Steer the company's travel policy by setting emissions reduction targets.
• Highlight those efforts in non-financial reporting and external communications.

Some forward-thinking companies even use this data to create internal green bonus schemes. These reward employees who choose the least polluting modes of transport. The approach is neutral for tax, yet highly valued on social and environmental grounds.

One key trend in expense management is the wide use of corporate payment cards. Modern solutions like those offered by Greenway are more than simple bank cards. They are real management tools. They end the old system where employees paid expenses upfront with their own money. That system caused stress and complexity for the employee and for the company's cash flow.

These cards can be customised in many ways. There are fuel cards (limited to petrol stations) and mobility cards (for the sustainable mobility allowance). There are also electronic toll cards, and lodge cards for corporate travel agencies. Each card can be linked to one employee, a department or a project. Spending limits and permissions can be changed in real time from a central dashboard.

Adding a set of corporate cards to your expense management tools brings concrete, immediate benefits:

• Control and security: Spending limits (daily, weekly, per transaction) block non-compliant or fraudulent expenses. So do restrictions by merchant category code (MCC). If a card is lost or stolen, you can block it instantly from the app.
• No more advances or reimbursements: Employees no longer need to use their own money. Company cash flow is better managed. The reimbursement process, often long and tedious, simply disappears.
• Accounting automation: This is the main advantage. Every payment made with a Greenway card appears instantly on the platform. The employee gets a notification to attach the receipt. Once the receipt is scanned, the payment and the receipt are matched automatically. The accounting entry is prepared with the correct cost allocation and VAT rate, ready to export to your ERP. Manual bank reconciliation is a thing of the past.
• Real-time visibility: The CFO or head of accounting has a dashboard that tracks spending live. This makes budget management far more flexible and proactive.

For businesses most committed to CSR, these cards also help limit unsustainable spending. For example, they can block payments to certain suppliers or for services that do not match company policy.

A tool only works at its best when it rests on clear rules. Writing down and sharing a professional expense policy is the basis of sound, compliant management. This internal document is more than a constraint. It is a guide that protects the business on tax matters. It also makes employees' lives easier by giving them a clear frame of reference. The policies that work best are built directly into the management tool. The Greenway platform lets you set up all of these rules:

• Which types of expenses are permitted and which are not.
• Spending limits by category, role or assignment.
• The receipts required for each type of expense.
• Approval workflows based on amounts or departments.
• Specific rules tied to the travel policy (transport class, hotel category, etc.).

The benefits are twofold. First, employees see at once what is allowed and what is not. The app warns them in real time of any overspend or breach of the rules. This prevents errors, frustrating back-and-forth and possible disputes. Second, HR and finance teams gain transparency. All employees are treated the same way, and the rules are applied every time.

The tool becomes a neutral guardian of the policy. Managers no longer have to play a sometimes awkward monitoring role.