This document is NOT intended to be the detailed PRD that was requested in the

assignment, it is rather a high level proposed design of the expense management solution to
cater to the different requests highlighted.

I wanted to share a high level design to ensure that the assumptions and open questions
can be aligned on. Request you to please review the assumptions and open
questions/limitations for the same. Please share your feedback around understanding
misalignments in the HLD. I will use the feedback to rethink the case for the final PRD.

Assumptions
● Expense policies are rules defined on components of expense (enlisted below)
● Any employee can raise an expense reimbursement request
● Any employee is eligible to get the Kodo Credit line/ Kodo Credit card
● Credit card can only be used to pay for expenses that have been pre-approved, no
approvals post transaction
● Bank transfer from credit line or linked bank account to the vendor can be initiated
after the submitted expenses are approved

Limitations/ Open questions:

● How to ensure that budget pre-approved on card is used for the respective activity,
for which the budget was approved?
○ Does Kodo receive vendor info when the card transaction is initiated? If yes,
can this information be used to ensure that card payment
● If the assumptions around expense policies need to be revisited, can a few examples
of expense policy be shared ?
Proposed high level design:

User Flow for bank transfers for company bank account/ Kodo credit:

1. Employee from customer company logs in to KODO

2. Creates a new expense, subject to the Expense rules applicable to the employee
3. Approvers are added manually or basis automated rules for the expense approval
4. Approvers have to approve the expenses within a defined period
5. Money is transferred to Vendor basis details from the expense post approval

User Flow for Credit Card:

1. Employee from customer company logs in to KODO
2. Applies for a Kodo credit card
3. Credit card request is approved
4. Employee creates a new expected expense/set of expenses within card, subject to
the Expense rules applicable to the employee
5. Approvers added manually or basis automated rules for the expected expense
approval
6. Approvers have to approve the expenses within a defined period
7. Credit limit gets adjusted on the credit card for particular expense category
8. Employee uses the card to pay for the actual expense
9. Kodo verifies Vendor category to ensure that the actual expense category and
amount matches the details from the budget and category of the approved expected
expense
How Expense Rules can be defined:
● Conditional and quantifier based Logical statement on the components of an
expense can be used for rule creation
These rules govern autoapprovals, chain of approvers to be added and Financial
team involvement
○ Components of an expense:
■ Budgeted expense amount
■ Actual expense amount
■ Expense category
■ Expense Bill Date
■ Expense period
■ Expense submission date
■ Vendor
■ Vendor Category
■ Geolocation
■ Expense creator
■ Expense Approver(s)
Secondary compinents
■ Team of expense creator
■ Designations of creators and approvers
■ Org chart - For adding skip and super-skip managers for approval
○ Additional component of Autocompute:
■ Number of autoapprovals allowed
■ Period of autoapproval (max. Can be set to 6/12 months in Kodo
default policy)
For instance,
If (vendor = “Known Vendor” and team = “marketing” and expense_geolocation =
“Delhi” and expense amount >= 10000
Then approvers = 2 hierarchical mangers (manager + skip) and finance team POC1

If (vendor = “Known Vendor” and team = “marketing”) and expense_geolocation =

“Delhi” and expense amount < 10000
Then autoapprove expense

How expense rules can be scoped within the organization (Which expenses submitted by
which teams and employees will be subject to a particular expense rule):
● Cascading/Hierarchichal rules to manage expense policies within the org
○ Rules set by Kodo will be applicable to all orgs using Kodo
■ Sanity check rules - can’t be overriden
■ Recommended/default rule set - can be overrriden
○ Rules Defined by CEO can be configured to be applicable to all expenses
within the org (All subordinates of the CEO and the subordinates of their
subordinates can be covered)
○ Rules Defined by CMO/CTO/CXO will be auxiliary to and adhere to CEO’s
rules and configured to be applicable only for expenses raised by team(s)
reporting to them
■ On so on
 For instance,
Sanity check rules,
Sum of budgeted expenses within the org need to sum up to the total budgeted
expense at each hierarchy.
Budgeted expense >= Actual expense ( budgeted expense need to be revised to
incorporate higher actual expense)

CEO has set this rules for org

If (expense amount >= 10000)
Then approvers need to have a finance team POC

Then any expense in the org will need to adhere to this rule.

How budget can be divided within the org :

● Expense budget split for subteams (For example, CEO splitting the total org budget
between CXOs and their orgs)
○ Absolute budget amount based splitting
○ Share/ratio of budget amount based splitting
○ Logic rule based splitting

For Instance, IF CEO has a total org budget of 100000, they can split the same in absolutes
like 45000, 25000 and 30000 for the 3 subteams (reporting to CEO)
Or in ratios like 2:3:5 etc. for the 3 subteams (reporting to CEO)