How CLVR AI evaluates expenses
What AI receipt scanning fills in for employees, which expense reports auto-approval evaluates, the four decision outcomes and the 85 percent confidence rule, which company files feed the decision, and why a report gets deferred.
CLVR's AI reads a receipt, fills in the expense form for an employee, and, where auto-approval is on, decides whether a qualifying wellness (friskvård) report can clear on its own. It is deliberately narrow: it only ever approves clear-cut gym memberships, it only acts when it is confident, and anything it is unsure about goes to a person. This article explains what receipt scanning fills in, what auto-approval evaluates, the four outcomes a decision can produce, which company files feed it, and why a report you expected to clear is still pending.
What receipt scanning fills in for employees
Once your company has receipt scanning on, employees do not have to do anything extra. When they upload a receipt while creating an expense report, CLVR reads the file in the background and pre-fills the details, so they only check the values and submit.
The employee adds a receipt on the Upload your expenses step, as either an image or a PDF.
On Fill-in expense details, CLVR scans the receipt straight away. A Scanning receipt notice with a Please wait... message shows while it works.
When the scan finishes, a Receipt scanned confirmation appears with the message Form has been pre-filled. Please verify the details. The fields that were filled are briefly highlighted with a sparkle.
The employee checks the values, fixes anything that looks off, finishes the confirmation checklist, and submits as usual.
There is no separate scan button. The scan starts on its own the moment a receipt is attached, and only when your company has the feature enabled. From the receipt, CLVR suggests and pre-fills the Benefit Category (matched to one of your enabled categories), the Expense Date, the provider name (the Company Name field), the Organization Number, the Receipt Cost (the total including VAT), and the VAT rate.
These are suggestions, not final answers. The employee can edit any field before submitting, and any correction they make is saved with the expense report. Scanning never submits an expense on its own, and the employee always reviews the form before submitting.
Each scan is logged against the employee and your company, so there is a record of when receipt scanning was used. The receipt file itself is stored securely with the expense report, the same as any other upload.
What auto-approval evaluates
When auto-approval is on, it is deliberately narrow. It only ever looks at wellness (friskvård) expense reports, and within that it only approves clear-cut gym memberships on its own. Everything outside that scope, and every wellness receipt the AI is not confident about, goes through your normal approval flow untouched.
- Only wellness (friskvård) expense reports are evaluated. No other benefit category is auto-evaluated, so travel, equipment, education, and anything else still follows your normal approval flow.
- This scope ships with the Sweden country pack. The rules are written around Swedish friskvårdsbidrag (wellness benefit), and the AI is told to keep those rules in mind when it reads a receipt.
- The AI only acts when auto-approval is switched on under AI Settings in your HR area.
The AI approves only when the receipt is clearly a gym membership. Specifically, it looks for a gym membership, a gym subscription card, or a recurring gym access pass; a clearly identifiable gym or fitness center name; a cost that represents a membership or subscription fee (not a one-off purchase); and a date of purchase or billing period.
It will not approve single gym visits or single-entry passes, protein bars, supplements, or food bought at a gym, personal training sessions, spa treatments or massage (unless the receipt is explicitly a friskvård service subscription), equipment purchases of any kind, any non-membership item bought at a gym, or bundled receipts where a membership is mixed with non-eligible items.
The AI is built to err on the side of caution. When in doubt it always defers to a person rather than risk a wrong approval, so a receipt it cannot read clearly simply lands in your normal queue.
The four decision outcomes
When auto-approval is on, CLVR reviews each new wellness report against the category rules and lands on one of four outcomes. Every outcome is recorded with a confidence score and a short list of reasons, so nothing happens silently.
- Approved. The AI is confident the receipt qualifies, so the report is set to approved and flows to reimbursement through payroll. Approval only happens at 85% confidence or higher, so anything the AI is unsure about is never auto-approved.
- Declined. The receipt is not eligible. The report is set to declined, and the employee gets a clear, plain-language reason plus a prompt to edit and resubmit.
- Changes requested. The receipt itself looks eligible, but the details typed into the form probably do not match it (for example the amount, VAT, provider name, or organisation number). The AI returns specific instructions, and the report goes back to the employee to correct, rather than being declined.
- Deferred. Whenever the AI is in doubt, the receipt is unclear or low quality, key information is missing, or its confidence sits below 85 percent, the report stays pending and goes through your normal human review.
The 85 percent threshold gates approval only. A decline, a changes request, or a defer can happen at any confidence level, since those outcomes keep a human in the loop or hand the report back to the employee.
Confidence is a number from 0 to 100 that reflects how certain the AI is about its reading of the receipt. Alongside the score, each decision stores up to three short reasons explaining the call. A decline also carries an employee-friendly explanation, and a changes request carries the steps the employee should fix.
How a decision appears on the report
Open an expense report under your HR expenses to see the AI's verdict on the report itself:
- A purple, AI-branded panel (marked with a sparkle) shows the outcome and the confidence, for example AI approved this expense with 92% confidence or AI requested changes with 88% confidence.
- Below the title you see the AI's reasons as a short bullet list, plus the decline explanation or the change instructions where they apply.
- For approved and declined reports, that AI panel is nested inside the green approved notice or the red rejected notice, so the status and the AI's reasoning sit together in one card.
- A small sparkle marker also appears next to AI-handled reports in the expenses list, so you can spot what the AI touched.
You are never locked into an AI call. If you disagree with an approve, decline, or changes request, you can revert it and send the report back to pending for manual review. See the related article on reverting an AI decision.
Which company files feed the decision
When company file context is on, CLVR reads the documents your HR team uploads under Company Files so the AI understands your own expense and benefit rules before it evaluates a report. It does not read everything you store, and it keeps only a short policy summary, not the files themselves.
Only document file types are included in the scan: PDF files, Word documents (.docx and .doc), and Apple Pages files. Everything else, including images, spreadsheets, and any other file type, is left out. If none of your uploaded files are scannable documents, there is nothing for the AI to read, and the policy summary stays empty.
CLVR reads the scannable documents to pull out only policy information, such as expense reporting and reimbursement rules, benefit usage rules and limits, wellness (friskvård) rules, approval criteria and thresholds, receipt and documentation requirements, and any category-specific benefit rules. Anything that is not about these rules is ignored on purpose.
To keep costs low, all of your scannable documents are read together in a single AI pass rather than one call per file.
CLVR does not store the contents of your documents. After a scan it keeps one short record per company: a single consolidated policy summary in plain text, a list of which files were scanned by file reference, and a token count used only to monitor cost. That summary is what the AI consults when it evaluates an expense report.
Troubleshooting
- A valid gym membership was not auto-approved. The receipt was probably unclear, low quality, or missing the gym name, cost, or date, so the AI deferred it. Review it as you normally would.
- A wellness receipt that is not a membership reached me anyway. That is expected. The AI only auto-approves clear memberships; single visits, supplements, personal training, and equipment are left for you to review.
- A non-wellness report was never evaluated. Only wellness (friskvård) is in scope today. Every other category follows your normal approval flow with no AI step.
- An employee says the form was not filled in. Check that receipt scanning is enabled for your company. If it is off, employees fill the form by hand and see no scan notice.
- A document I uploaded is not reflected in decisions. Confirm it is a PDF, Word, or Apple Pages file. Images and spreadsheets are skipped.
Why a report was deferred to human review
A defer is the cautious outcome: instead of guessing, the AI hands the report to your HR team. On the report a deferred outcome shows as AI deferred this expense to human review. Nothing was auto-decided, so there is no approval or decline to undo: the status stays Pending, it enters your normal review flow under Expenses, and anyone on your HR team approves or declines it the usual way.
The AI defers when it is not confident enough to approve (an approve-leaning read below 85 percent), when the receipt is unclear or low quality, when key information is missing (an identifiable gym name, a membership or subscription cost, and a date or billing period), or when the case is genuinely ambiguous.
- A report I expected to auto-approve is still pending. The AI deferred it, most often because confidence was below 85 percent or the receipt was hard to read. Review it as usual.
- There is no Revert button. Reverting applies only to an AI approval, decline, or changes request. A deferred report was never auto-decided, so there is nothing to undo: just review the pending expense.
- Many receipts keep getting deferred. Ask employees to upload a clear, full image where the gym name, the membership cost, and the date are all legible. Sharper receipts give the AI enough to decide.