BigTime’s Expense Agent is here to make capturing expenses easier than ever. But the only way to make that happen is by ensuring your team actually uses it.
This guide gives you everything you need to champion Expense Agent inside your organization: an executive sell sheet, a copy-paste Slack announcement, and a simple rollout playbook.
Before the Rollout: Building Excitement
Getting Access to Expense Agent
Expense Agent is currently in Early Access with select customers. You can join the waitlist here.
Once your firm has access to the Expense Agent, an administrator of your BigTime account will need to ensure that both AVA and Expense Agent are enabled. You can manage this from the Active Features list in your BigTime environment.
Securing Executive Buy-In
Send this to your leadership team before launch to help create excitement.
Executive Slack Announcement
“Hi all. Sharing a new functionality from BigTime that could save us a lot of unbillable time.
BigTime is offering expense submission through its AI chat. Team members can submit expenses in seconds by uploading receipts to AVA (BigTime’s AI assistant).
This gives us:
- More billable time. Expensing through AVA is 4x faster than submitting a traditional expense. This could save us up to 7.5 admin hours per employee per month.
- Faster month-end close. AVA is benchmarked to reduce 20-30% of review time and help close month-end approvals 2-5 days faster.
- No new tool to learn. Our team already uses AVA, so this does not require a new implementation.
Also, quick callout: human review is still required.The Expense Agent is AI-powered, but it never submits anything automatically. All expenses must be reviewed by the user before submission and will still follow our regular approval process.”
For BigTime Premier users:
“This functionality is free to us, with no limits on the expenses we submit. I’m planning to roll out communications with the team to begin encouraging them to expense this way. Happy to chat through any questions.”
For BigTime Essentials and Advanced users:
“Currently, we have access to this functionality through a 60-day fee trial. If we want to maintain it, we will need to upgrade to BigTime Premier. I wanted to start the conversation early, as I see a lot of value here.”
After the Rollout: Driving Adoption
Slack Template: Team Announcement
We recommend starting a dedicated Slack channel to monitor your team’s progress with AVA. Once you’ve got that set up, customize these message and drop them into your team channel. It’s a good idea to nudge your team over the course of a few weeks to make sure everyone is feeling confident about the new functionality.
Week 1
“Hey team 👋 We’re rolling out a new way to submit expenses that’s going to save you a lot of time (BigTime estimates it’ll work 4x faster).
Starting now, you can submit expenses directly through AVA, BigTime’s AI assistant. Just open BigTime, start a chat, and either:
📸 Upload a photo of your receipt, or
💬 Describe the expense in the chat
AVA’s Expense Agent will automatically pull out the key details, match it to your project, and have it ready for your review in seconds.
You can also ask AVA things like ‘Show me my unsubmitted expenses’ or ‘How much have I charged to [project].’
To get started:
- Log into BigTime and tap into the AVA chat
- Upload a photo of your receipt/s (up to five at a time)
- If you don’t have a receipt, just tell AVA that you want to create an expense. Specify what the expense is, how much you spent, and what project it belongs to.
- Review what AVA pulls from the receipt
- Once it looks good, click submit, and you’re done!
If you’ve got questions, drop them here or ping me. Happy to walk anyone through it.”
Week 2
“Quick reminder that automated expensing is live with AVA, BigTime’s AI assistant.
In addition to submitting expenses, you can also ask AVA things like:
- ‘Show me my unsubmitted expenses’
- ‘How much have I charged to [project]?’
- ‘What expenses are pending approval?’
It can pull up the info you need in seconds.”
Week 3
“How’s everyone doing with BigTime’s Expense Agent?
If you haven’t tried it yet, this week is a great time to start, especially if you’ve got receipts piling up. A quick tip: if you don’t have a photo of a receipt, you can describe expenses in plain language (e.g. ‘Lunch with a client, $45, charge to Project X’) and AVA will create the entry for you.
I’d love to hear how it’s going!”
Week 4
“Hi all! Last nudge on this, promise, but just one more reminder to try out expensing through AVA.
The goal is to make this the default way we submit expenses. Just take a picture and submit as soon as you get a receipt. Takes 30 seconds, and saves all of us time on reconciliation.
AVA is right there in BigTime whenever you need it. And if you get stuck, shoot me a message.”
Rollout Playbook
Week 1 — Pilot
- Identify 3–5 pilot users: prioritize frequent travelers, high-expense roles, and at least one approver
- Send pilot users the Slack message above with a personal note asking for honest feedback
- Demo Expense Agent live (all-hands or a quick Loom), showing a real receipt being processed in real time
Week 2 — Expand
- Collect 2–3 wins from the pilot group (time saved, errors caught, etc.)
- Share those wins in a team channel or meeting
- Send the Slack announcement to the full team
- Remind approvers to watch for cleaner submissions and flag any issues
Ongoing — Sustain
- Periodically check in with Finance on these two questions: (1) Are people submitting through AVA? (2) Are approvers seeing fewer rejections?
- Share these findings with leadership and tie them back to the executive checklist above
- Celebrate milestones publicly (first 100 expenses submitted, first month-end close with no late stragglers, etc.)
Common Questions to Get Ahead Of
“What if Expense Agent gets something wrong?”
Expense Agent never submits on its own. Every expense requires human review and approval before it goes anywhere. Mistakes are easy to fix.
“Do we need training?”
No. If your team knows how to use AVA, they already know how to use Expense Agent. The first experience takes about 30 seconds.
“Who has access?”
For BigTime Premier users:
All users can submit expenses through Expense Agent. There is no limit to the number of expenses that can be submitted this way.
For BigTime Essentials and Advanced users:
We rolled out a 60-day free trial of the Expense Agent. If we all see value from this trial, we will consider adding it permanently to our package.
Ready to See What Expense Agent Can Do For Your Team?
Expense Agent is currently in Early Access, and coming soon to more users of BigTime Premier, Essentials, and Advanced. Join the waitlist and we’ll reach out as soon as Expense Agent is available to you.
