VAT4U was built to move large volumes of travel expenses and accounts payable (AP) invoices through a VAT recovery process. The single biggest efficiency gain available to you as an Expert is not any individual feature. It is a change of working method: stop opening transactions one by one and start driving them in batches, using Smart AI to enrich the data and a small set of statuses and reports to steer the flow. This guide documents the recommended process shown in Training 1. It covers Smart AI data enrichment, batch execution, the Human Review flag, applying AI results, audit statuses, credit management, the Processing Analytics Report, and the correct use of demo data. Screenshots are intentionally omitted; the guide follows the exact menu labels so you can navigate directly in the platform.
THE CORE PRINCIPLE
Opening a small invoice costs more than the VAT inside it. Use Smart AI plus filters to push the bulk of transactions forward or out without ever opening them, and spend human time only on lines that are flagged, unusual, or with high amounts.
The mass processing mindset
The traditional way of working is to open an invoice, read it, enter or correct the data,
save, and move to the next one. Even with AI filling the fields, this remains human data entry, just faster. It is acceptable for a handful of AP invoices. It does not scale for travel expenses, and it destroys profitability on small transactions.
The recommended pattern is a triage. After running Smart AI on a filtered population, split the result into three groups of expenses:
Small and green. Potential cash-back below your threshold (for example 50 EUR), compliance status looks compliant, VAT amount matched, no flags. Do not open these lines. Mark them as verified by tech and let them move to the claim.
Small and red. Not compliant, mismatched amounts, missing documents: Exclude them in batch without opening them. Ninety percent of the time the system is right and hunting for the exception costs more than the VAT you would recover.
Large or flagged. Big invoices and lines flagged for human review always deserve a manual check. A minute spent on a large invoice is well invested; the same minute on a 5 EUR receipt is a loss.
Everything in the rest of this guide exists to make this triage fast, auditable, and repeatable.
What Smart AI does
Smart AI is not a single AI call. It combines OCR, VAT4U's own parsing and validation logic, AI extraction, and a second AI layer that reviews the quality of the first result.
On each transaction it can:
Extract vendor information, invoice number, invoice date, net, VAT and gross amounts, and the full itemisation of the document (overnights, breakfast, parking, and so on).
Map document lines to VAT4U's VAT recovery categories, which is the part a generic AI tool cannot do reliably.
Validate the structure and validity of VAT identification numbers (for example the format of a German VAT ID and whether it is a real registered number).
Detect the country and the period on its own. You can run Smart AI on a batch of raw PDFs with no accompanying data, and the agents will first identify the country, then check whether the transaction is in scope.
Two design decisions matter for your process:
Origin tracking: every value is logged with its origin: imported, entered by a human, or provided by AI. This is your audit trail. AI values may be wrong, and the system never hides where a value came from.
Separate AI layer: AI results are written to a dedicated AI fields (the purple fields in the Manage expense table), not on top of your imported data. Data from SRXP, Concur or any other source is only overwritten when you explicitly apply the AI results, field by field (see more in this section)
Running Smart AI in batch
Never trigger AI from inside individual invoices when you have volume. A single extraction can take up to 30 seconds; clicking, waiting and moving to the next line wastes your day. Run it once on the whole expenses set and let it process in the background.
Filter. In Manage Expenses, filter the transactions you want to enrich: company, country, period, refund status, missing data, and so on. Lines without an attached document are automatically skipped.
Run Smart AI. Open the Smart AI menu and choose AI Data Enrichment. The other entries are specialised checks, described in section 5.
Decide on comparison. Tick the option to compare AI results with your original data when that data is genuine (for example imported from SRXP). Leave it unticked when the original data is placeholder data, such as estimates where every line was imported as 10 EUR, Germany, January 1. Comparing against fake data produces noise.
Let it run. Each run is saved as a tagged AI batch, so you can retrieve and review that specific run later. Track progress under Reports -> Running Jobs, where you see how many of the selected transactions have been processed.
WHEN ONE BY ONE IS FINE
Manually opening an invoice and clicking the AI button is acceptable for occasional AP invoices where you review everything anyway. First process them by Batch AI to have a fast AI process when you switch to Data entry. For travel and domestic volumes, always work in batch.
Specialised AI checks
Besides AI Data Enrichment, the Smart AI menu offers targeted checks. Each one does a single thing, slightly better than the general enrichment does it. Use them as an extra pass on data you already have, or when a specific risk matters for a claim.
Check | What it does | When to use it |
AI Data Enrichment | Full extraction and category mapping. The main run. | Always the first pass on new or unverified data. |
Identify gifts and entertainment | Detects expenses that are likely gifts or client entertainment rather than what the employee declared. | Countries where entertainment is non-deductible or restricted. |
Detect tips | Spots tips, including handwritten ones, added to restaurant bills. | UK and other markets where tipping is common and non- recoverable. |
Multi-person meals | Reads the items to estimate the number of diners, indicating possible entertainment. | UK-style rules where a meal with several people must be reclassified or checked. |
Invoice vs receipt classification | Classifies documents as full invoices or simplified receipts. | Refund processes that are strict on document type, such as the German VAT refund procedure. Less useful for Spain or Belgium, where a missing full invoice is already flagged as non-compliant. |
New checks can be built on request. If your market has a recurring risk that none of the checks covers, raise it with the VAT4U team.
Human Review: Letting the system tell you what to open (BETA)
The Human Review field is populated by a dedicated AI agent whose only job is to decide whether a line deserves your attention, and why. A line is flagged in two situations:
The AI judges its own extraction as not reliable enough.
The extraction looks fine, but a hard control fails. The typical case is a gross amount mismatch: the hotel invoice says 300 EUR, but the expense report claims 200 EUR because company policy caps the reimbursement. A human must decide which amount drives the VAT calculation.
Forcing review by amount
Management can impose review rules independent of AI confidence. In the company
profile, under the tab Expense Processing you can require that every invoice above a threshold, for example 500 EUR, is reviewed by a human even when the AI result is clean. The setting exists at two levels: your Expert entity profile, as the default, and each claimant company, to override it. Setting a claimant threshold to zero forces human review of everything for that client. The threshold is currently global per company, not per country.
Use it commercially
The review threshold is a discussion point with your clients. Some will trust AI fully; others will pay for systematic human review above an agreed amount. Agree on the parameters, configure them per claimant, and your process becomes both tailored and auditable.
Reviewing and applying AI results
After a batch run, open the Smart AI results preview for that run (Show Preview Smart AI Results, then See Results). Instead of reading 200 invoices, you read one summary. For each field, the platform reports how many times the AI found a value, how often that value matches your original data, how often it differs, and how often your data was simply empty. From any difference count you can drill down: the platform lists the AI value against the original value line by line, opens the underlying document on click, and can open the Manage Expenses table pre-filtered on the differing lines. This is where you judge whether the AI or the source data is more trustworthy. A common finding: employees enter the order or transaction number where the invoice number belongs, or the declaration date from the expense tool differs from the real invoice date. In both cases the AI value is usually the correct one.
Applying results field by field
Once you have decided, apply the AI results with a strategy per field:
Strategy | Effect |
Do not use | The AI value is ignored for this field. |
Use if empty | The AI value fills only when source data is not available for the field. The safe default. |
Use if empty or different | The AI value overwrites your data whenever it differs. Choose this option only when you verified and trust AI data more than the source. |
Before executing, the platform summarizes exactly how many lines will be overwritten per field. Overwriting is definitive for those fields, so read that summary. Lines that are already claimed are protected and will not be modified.
AI Transactions
Applying AI results consumes no credits. Transactions are spent when the AI runs, not when you use its output. Run once, exploit the results as many times as you need.
Closing the loop with statuses
The triage from section 2 is executed with two batch actions in Manage Expenses.
Refund status
Filter the lines that are clearly dead: not compliant, VAT amount not matched, no realistic recovery. Select them and update the refund status to excluded, in batch, without opening them. This is a defensible decision; no client should blame you for not manually inspecting a 4 EUR non-compliant receipt.
Audit status: verified by human vs verified by tech
VAT4U has always tracked human verification: when someone opens an invoice and saves it, the line is marked verified by human. Running AI on a line does not count as verification. What is new is the ability to earmark decisions taken at scale: after you have filtered, run the AI, checked the summary and decided that a population of lines is fine, select them and set the audit status to verified by tech.
The effect is practical: those lines can be filtered out of your daily processing view so you never touch them again until claim preparation, and your decision is traceable. This is exactly how the VAT4U team operates internally on millions of transactions.
Processing Analytics Report (beta)
Working from the Manage Expenses table means living in filters, and it is easy to lose the overview. The Processing Analytics Report, currently in beta, gives operations and management the same picture: how many transactions were imported, on which portion AI ran, what was flagged for review, what was verified by human or by tech, and what is compliant, non-compliant or excluded.
Every cluster is clickable. If two flagged expenses were never verified, one click opens the pre-filtered transaction list behind the number.
KPIs summarize the position: number of transactions, potential cashback, share looking compliant, amounts excluded and why. An 8,000 EUR loss on expired deadlines becomes visible in seconds instead of being buried in a filter.
It doubles as a daily driver: start the morning from the report, click into flagged for review, and work that list first.
It is also a transparency tool towards clients: the report shows the process applied to their data, which supports the auditability of your service.
The report is currently in Beta testing, and Expert pilots can request early access; feedback during the beta directly shapes the future report.