Streamlining manager expense reviews in hospitals
Accelerate AI Adoption
Review Challenge
Slow expense reviews in hospitals are reducible at the point of approval. Most expense management systems do not guide managers through the review workflow efficiently.
Each claim requires the manager to verify the amount, check cost center allocation, confirm receipts, and approve or return the submission. A claim against the wrong cost center triggers a manual lookup. A missing receipt means returning the claim and reviewing it after resubmission. A claim exceeding the approval threshold routes to a second approver, but the system does not tell the first manager their approval alone will not release payment.
The delays follow predictable patterns. A department head with 30 direct reports reviews claims in batches, missing policy violations buried in the queue. A newly promoted manager approves claims that should be escalated because threshold rules live in a policy PDF, not the approval screen. A cost center reallocation from last quarter has not reached the reference data, so every claim against that center is returned. These are not knowledge failures. The expense system does not surface the relevant rules at the point of review, and classroom training cannot keep pace with quarterly policy updates.
Our Solution
Userlane is a software adoption platform that works inside browser-based applications. For expense review workflows, it reduces review time where delays happen: inside the expense system, during the approval itself.
Guiding the correct review sequence
In-app guidance walks managers through the review workflow that matches the claim type: standard expenses, travel claims, capital expenditure requests, or claims requiring escalation. Each pathway surfaces the relevant policy rules, cost center references, and threshold information inside the approval screen.
Catching policy violations before approval
Validators check each expense review as the manager processes it. A cost center code that does not match the submitter’s department, a claim amount that exceeds the single-approval threshold, a missing receipt on a claim above the documentation limit: each is flagged before the approval is submitted, not caught during the monthly reconciliation.
Tracking review efficiency over time
The HEART Score, Userlane’s application health metric, tracks the share of expense reviews completed correctly on the first attempt and the time from submission to approval. The finance team sees the breakdown by department, claim type, and manager cohort: where review times improved and where bottlenecks remain.
Measure. Act. Prove.
Every deployment follows the same cycle. Measurement comes first, intervention second, proof third. The cycle repeats with each new workflow.
Measure
Userlane records every expense review before any intervention starts. The data shows where review delays and errors concentrate, so the team acts on evidence, not assumptions.
Validators observe. Every review action is recorded: which claims are approved on the first attempt, which are returned, where managers approve claims that should have been escalated. Nothing changes for the managers. The expense system works exactly as before.
A pattern emerges. Travel claims take three times longer to review than standard expenses because managers search for per diem rates outside the system. Newly promoted managers approve above-threshold claims without escalation at twice the rate of experienced managers. Capital expenditure reviews stall because the approval workflow requires a field that 60% of managers cannot locate. The HEART Score puts a single number on the workflow’s health.
The team sees the real problem. Not “all managers need expense policy training.” Travel claim reviews need reference data in the screen, and new managers need threshold guidance. The intervention writes itself.
Act
In-app guidance and Validators deploy only where the measurement found delays. Targeting the intervention is what makes the result provable.
Guidance activates. Only for the claim types and manager cohorts that measured slowest. Travel claims get per diem references inside the review screen. Capital expenditure reviews get field-level navigation. Standard expenses, which already process efficiently, see no change.
Validators catch policy violations. Threshold breaches, cost center mismatches, missing documentation: each is flagged before the approval is submitted. Managers with low error rates see no change.
The intervention stays proportional. New managers get escalation guidance. Experienced managers with consistent review patterns are left alone. The finance team sees progress without waiting for the monthly reconciliation.
Prove
The same measurement that found the problem now tracks whether the fix worked. A falling review time, confirmed against the finance team’s own reconciliation data, closes the loop.
The HEART Score moves. The same measurement that found the problem now tracks the fix. First-attempt approval rates and review times by department, claim type, and manager cohort show whether the intervention worked.
Results track against the target. The goal the team set before the intervention tracks automatically. The quarterly review gets a before-and-after built from live data, not a separate report.
The cycle starts over. The organization updates its expense policy. Approval thresholds change. The HEART Score flags a dip. Measure, act, prove runs again. The infrastructure is already there.
Proven Impact
When in-app guidance and Validators replace classroom training and policy PDFs on expense review workflows, the results show in the health system’s own data: faster approval cycles, fewer policy violations reaching the finance team, and shorter time to competency for newly promoted managers.
Up to 97%
Task completion rate across enterprise deployments
Up to 75%
Reduction in training time for new staff
Up to 48%
Fewer support requests after deployment
Up to 60%
Lower training costs vs. classroom methods
Frequently Asked Questions
