When you talk to anyone in product today, one thing becomes obvious fast: expense management is changing quicker than most companies can keep up with.
What used to take minutes (or even hours) is now expected to take seconds.
Employees want the same experience they get from Apple or other intuitive mobile apps. Finance wants accuracy, compliance and workflows that don’t break at month-end. And heading into 2026, those expectations aren’t slowing down: they’re accelerating.
This blog is built directly from an interview with Product Manager Jihane Karym, whose insights reveal exactly where expense management is heading next.
Jihane puts it simply:
This is the biggest 2026 trend:
In 2024–2025, Declaree’s AI OCR already jumped from covering 60–70% of required expense fields to around 90%. The following details are extracted automatically:
The direction of the entire industry is shifting from “fill out your expenses” to:
One of the strongest real-world insights from the transcript:
They snap receipts immediately, and tools need to support that behaviour.
Heading into 2026, the expectation is:
This is why Declaree rebuilt the entire app, not to add more features, but to remove friction:
Or in our language: Scan, fold & throw — we do the rest.
This is something Jihane highlighted repeatedly:
Declaree’s rebuilt mobile app is already delivering results, with NPS rising by 15.8 points since launch.
Employees don’t want a “feature-rich app.”
They want an intuitive one that helps them complete a task and close the app.
While US-style expense tools shout about automation and speed, the transcript makes it clear:
By 2026, companies will prioritise tools that can:
This is where Declaree (and the broader Mobilexpense Group) already stands apart.
Automation gets you speed.
Compliance gives you confidence.
The next logical step after automation:
A world where:
Declaree is already moving toward this with:
By 2026, “doing expenses” will be an outdated concept.
Companies above certain size/thresholds are now required to disclose environmental and social data, including emissions and other environmental impact information.
Finance teams are already feeling the pressure to collect CO₂ data with more accuracy and far less manual work. The challenge is that most companies are adding yet another tool to do it, along with yet another survey that employees must be chased to complete.
There is a simpler path. Declaree uses the existing OCR workflow to extract the CO₂ data you need directly from receipts. No extra systems to manage. No new behaviour to push. No lofty surveys that sit unfinished in someone’s inbox.
Automate the mundane and look for the data in the place you already prioritise. If expenses are flowing, your CO₂ data will flow too.
Competitors may market themselves well, but the fundamentals matter more:
Declaree combines:
As Jihane said:
Book a short walkthrough of the new Declaree mobile app.
See how your employees can submit (and your finance team can review) expenses faster than ever.