Last Updated on November 28, 2025
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Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we have moved our critical client meetings to zoom and allowed our luggage tag to gather dust. When most of us are not travelling to the office, going on a business trip feels like a far-fetched dream.
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Amidst all the pandemic travel struggle, I got an exhilarating chance to understand expense management in this new normal of WFH in the first edition of Happay Brown Bag session.
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Sudheendra Bharadwaj, who is a subject matter expert at Happay, shared some exciting features in the session which could come handy while working remotely with his very own personal experience.
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“Imagine you are travelling for a client meeting and suddenly the lockdown is implemented in the whole country due to COVID -19. This is exactly what happened to me on a business trip to Mumbai in early March, and I got stuck in Mumbai till the end of the lockdown. It was very unpredictable for both me and my management. I could not have survived without some necessary expense management features, and obviously Netflix and Amazon Prime” said Sudheendra smilingly.
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Shashwat Ghosh, VP Marketing at Happay, also took part in the session to give us the perspective of the management in such a scenario. “First few days of being Sudheendra in a different city was a nightmare; we had to do something very quickly to make things easier for him, and suddenly duty of care became very important,” said Shashwat.
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He also added that the management made sure that cash advances are happening on time, bills are not getting stuck as expenses like food bills, regular sanitisation, protective supplies like mask, gloves and were happening very regularly. They also had to make exceptional approvals for tools like zoom and other applications to make remote working more comfortable.
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Sudheendra mentioned that he had a variety of expenses which he had to take care of during the lockdown and also while returning to his base city Bengaluru. “I had to take COVID test, book my return flight, pay for my mandatory institutional quarantine and also other expenses like sanitisers, masks were very prominent. I could do all of these through my mobile app and make sure all approvals were in place from my manager and finance team even while working remotely” said Sudheendra.
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I was very delighted to know that a business traveller like him who had the privilege of having an expense management system in place with such features could easily manage their expenses smoothly even while working smoothly.
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When asked about two features that you absolutely loved, Sudheendra could not stop talking about OCR capability which enabled him to file an expense just with a click of picture without even touching the paper bill and mail box integration which helped him add the expense into the report automatically. While Shashwat swear by the query management system and policy exception report which helps him to track the approvals and requests and also facilitate him to analyse the relevant policies to be implemeneted in any scenario.
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To know the detailed features and the rest of the exciting experience of Sudheendra, watch the first episode of Happay Brown Bag.
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