Per diem and lodging, tracked to the dollar
A superintendent running a solar build three hours from the home office has a crew on the road for weeks. Each person earns per diem. Each person also spends on a motel, meals, and sometimes...
The problem
A superintendent running a solar build three hours from the home office has a crew on the road for weeks. Each person earns per diem. Each person also spends on a motel, meals, and sometimes laundry or a rental car. Those two numbers rarely get compared until the month closes.
By then the picture is stale. A motel rate jumped when a local event filled the town. Two guys doubled up in one room and one didn't. A foreman paid for a team dinner on his own card. Someone worked a Saturday that never made it into the per diem count. Nobody did anything wrong. The records just live in four places: the daily log, a text thread, receipt photos, and the payroll sheet.
The result is a surprise. Either the road cost more than the job was carrying, or per diem is covering more than expected and nobody planned for it. The superintendent wants to know that on Friday, while there is still time to change something.
How the agent workflow works
The agent reads four inputs on a set schedule, once each weekday evening and once more on Friday for the weekly close.
First, the daily log. It pulls who was on site each day, so it knows how many per diem days each person earned. Second, the lodging records: booking confirmations and folio emails forwarded to a shared inbox. Third, receipt photos that crew members drop into a shared folder or message thread. The agent extracts vendor, date, and amount, and tags each as lodging, meal, or other. Fourth, the per diem rules for the job, which you write once as a plain-text sheet: who qualifies, which days count, and how partial days are handled.
Each weekday evening it updates a running sheet per person and for the whole crew: per diem earned, lodging spent, meals spent, and the gap. On Friday it drafts a one-page reconciliation. It lists totals, flags anything odd, and asks questions it cannot answer itself.
Typical flags: a receipt with no matching workday, a workday with no lodging record, a lodging charge higher than the same stay on earlier nights, a receipt photo it could not read, and a person on site who has no per diem entry.
The human checkpoint is the Friday draft. The superintendent reads it, answers the flagged questions, corrects any misread receipts, and approves. Only approved numbers go to payroll or the project manager. The agent never changes pay, never submits anything, and never decides whether an expense is allowed.
What you need to set it up
- An AI assistant that can read email, a shared folder, and a spreadsheet, with permission to write to one sheet only.
- A shared inbox for lodging confirmations, and a folder where crew drop receipts.
- A daily log in a form the agent can read, such as a shared document or exported entries.
- The written per diem rules for this job, kept short and unambiguous.
- A short crew habit: photograph every receipt the same day and name who it belongs to.
Setup is a few hours, most of it spent writing the rules sheet and testing against one past week where you already know the answers. Ongoing cost is the assistant subscription you may already have. Budget about fifteen minutes on Friday for review.
Where it breaks
Receipt reading is the weak point. Crumpled, faded, or angled thermal paper gets misread, and a wrong digit looks as confident as a right one. That is why the Friday review exists, and why the agent should show the receipt image next to the extracted amount.
Split costs confuse it. A shared room, a group dinner on one card, or a charge covering several people needs a human to say who it belongs to.
It only knows what it is fed. If the crew stops photographing receipts, the totals quietly drift low and look fine. Watch for a week with suspiciously few receipts.
Rules change midjob. A client may alter what is reimbursable, or a new hire may fall under different terms. If the rules sheet is not updated, the agent applies old rules correctly and gets the wrong answer.
Finally, it does not handle tax treatment or company policy disputes. Those stay with whoever owns payroll.
The bottom line
This will not save money by itself. It tells you what the road costs while the job is still running, in time to move a crew into cheaper lodging, fix a missed per diem day, or adjust the next bid. The agent keeps the books current. The superintendent still decides what to do about them.
Related use cases
- The monthly subscription and bill audit Money
- Two-week lookahead, built not typed Management
- Three-way match on every delivery Materials