Write your expense policy in plain English. Mylo enforces it

Every company has a spending policy. It usually lives in a PDF: a dozen pages, written once, read by almost no one. Enforcement is a person: an approver squinting at each expense, trying to remember whether the meal cap is $60 or $75, whether sales got a higher one, and whether that Tuesday dinner is the second or third one this week.

Mylo turns the document itself into the reviewer. Paste your policy as text or upload the PDF, and every new expense is automatically checked against it. No rule builder, no dropdowns, no translating prose into forms. The policy you already wrote is the configuration.

One policy for everyone, and one for each role, and each person

Policies in Mylo come in layers:

• Organisation: applies to everyone in your org.
• By role: extra rules for owners, admins, or members.
• By person: a policy assigned to one specific member (read-only to them).
• Personal: everyone can also keep their own policy for their own spend.

When an expense comes in, Mylo reads every policy that applies to its creator together, in a single pass, so a role policy that extends the org policy, or a personal rule that narrows it, is judged in full context rather than as disconnected checks.

Flags with reasons, and receipts for the flag itself

Each new or edited expense gets a policy badge: checking, then Policy OK or Policy flag. A flag always carries a one-line, human-readable reason ("Exceeds the $75 meal limit in the org policy"), not a mystery code.

And Mylo doesn't judge a line in isolation. It can search the submitter's own expense history before ruling: is this a duplicate of one already filed? one slice of a split purchase? the third meal today? When sibling expenses drive a flag, Mylo cites the exact expenses it looked at, so the approver sees the evidence, not just the verdict.

Approvers see the flag right in the approval queue, next to the expense it belongs to, so the flagged handful stands out from the clean pile.

The math is math, not vibes

Prose is great for judgment calls, but numbers deserve arithmetic. When you save a policy, Mylo compiles the hard limits out of the text into deterministic rules ("Meals: $75 per day", "Receipt required over $75", "Alcohol: not allowed") and checks those by pure arithmetic over the actual expenses, never by a model estimating totals.

The compiled rules are listed on the policy, human-readable and editable. Fix one, add your own, or delete one; rules you touch are pinned, so re-saving the policy text never overwrites your corrections.

A flag is a heads-up, never a roadblock

Mylo never blocks an employee from submitting an expense. A flag is information, not a verdict from a machine: the expense still lands in the approval queue, and a human decides: approve it anyway, or deny it with a reason. Policy enforcement stays assistive, and people stay in charge.

Submitters get the same courtesy early: the check runs while an expense is still a draft, and if your drafts are trending over a cumulative cap (say, a daily meal limit), Mylo tells you before you submit, not after.

Exceptions and contradictions, handled like an auditor would

Real policies have exceptions: "during approved conferences the meal cap is $150 per day." When a limit fires, Mylo checks the written policies for an explicit exception that covers the expense, verifies its conditions actually hold, and only waives the flag by quoting the exact sentence from your policy, never out of "common sense". The waiver is recorded on the expense, so the audit trail shows which limit fired and which written rule cleared it.

And if two of your policies contradict each other (one permits what another forbids), Mylo flags the expense and spells out the conflict, naming both policies, so the fix (clarifying the documents) is obvious.

Good to know

• Flag-only, by design. Mylo never blocks a submission and never auto-denies. Every flag goes to a human reviewer.
• Who manages what. Owners and admins manage org, role, and per-person policies; every member manages their own personal policy. A connected accountant can manage a client org's policies too.
• Employees can read what they're measured against. Members see the org and role policies that apply to them, read-only.
• Text or PDF. Paste, type, start from a built-in template, or upload a PDF; Mylo extracts the text and works from that.
• Edits take effect immediately. Change the policy text and the compiled limits are re-extracted; new expenses are checked against the new rules.

Ready to set one up? Follow the step-by-step guide: How to set up spending policies. For the rest of the expense flow, see Submitting, approving, and denying expenses.