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APSense documentation

Key concepts

APSense is designed to remove the manual effort from expense management. To get the most out of the platform, it helps to understand how the system organizes your data and uses artificial intelligence to automate your workflows.

Workspaces

Workspaces are the primary containers for your data. They allow you to maintain strict separation between different areas of your professional and personal life. For example, you might have one workspace for your primary employer, another for a side consulting business, and a third for personal tax-deductible expenses.

  • Isolation: Each workspace has its own independent set of reports, expenses, and vendor profiles.
  • Context Switching: You can quickly switch between workspaces using the sidebar or top bar. This changes the entire context of the app, ensuring you don’t accidentally add a business receipt to a personal report.
  • Customization: You can customize each workspace with unique names, colors, and icons to make them easily identifiable at a glance.

Cortexa AI and adaptive learning

APSense uses the Cortexa AI engine to handle the heavy lifting of data entry. When you snap a photo of a receipt or forward one via email, the system doesn’t just read the text; it understands the document structure.

  • Intelligent Extraction: The AI automatically identifies the vendor, total amount, date, and category.
  • Calculation Fallbacks: To ensure accuracy, the system performs internal math. If the total amount is blurry, the AI attempts to verify it by adding the subtotal, tax, and tip found elsewhere on the receipt.
  • Adaptive Learning: The system gets smarter the more you use it. If you manually correct a vendor name or change a category for a specific merchant, APSense remembers that preference. The next time you scan a receipt from that same vendor, the system applies your previous corrections automatically.

Reports and approval workflows

In APSense, an expense is a single line item, while a report is the finished document you submit for reimbursement or tax purposes.

  • The Report Lifecycle: Reports move through a specific sequence of statuses:
    1. Active: You are currently adding expenses to this report.
    2. Submitted: You have sent the report to an approver or accounting department.
    3. Approved/Rejected: The reviewer has made a decision on the report.
    4. Reimbursed: The final stage, indicating the funds have been paid back to you.
  • Professional Output: Reports bundle your expenses into polished PDF or CSV files. These documents include category breakdowns, charts, and embedded receipt images.
  • Frictionless Approvals: When you submit a report, your manager receives a secure link. They can review and approve your report directly from their email inbox without needing to create an APSense account or download the app.

Smart mileage tracking

Tracking business travel requires more than just a simple odometer log. APSense provides multiple ways to record your trips while ensuring the data is audit-ready for IRS compliance.

  • Drift Filtering: Standard GPS tracking often suffers from “phantom mileage”—small movements recorded while you are actually stationary. APSense uses smart filtering to ignore signal drift and impossible speed jumps, ensuring your logs reflect actual driving distance.
  • Flexible Entry Methods: You can log mileage in four ways:
    • GPS: Start a live trip and let the app track you in the background.
    • Odometer: Enter your starting and ending dashboard readings.
    • Map-Based: Select your start and end addresses to calculate the most efficient driving route.
    • Manual: Simply enter the total miles or kilometers driven.
  • Automated Reimbursement: The system uses built-in IRS standard rates to calculate exactly how much you are owed for every trip you record.

Need help? If you have questions about these concepts, contact our support team: