A Business Travel Management App Built From MVP to Market Fit
Overview
Together with Finch, we worked on business travel management app development from the very early idea to realization. Finch required software to handle corporate group travel by offering collaborative planning, multiple user bookings, efficient expense tracking, and an AI assistant to streamline trip building. Previously, these processes were manual and prone to errors, leading to inefficiencies and user dissatisfaction — we helped develop a B2B software product that simplifies work-related travel, ensuring seamless access for all users while maintaining robust data security.
From early idea to MVP, using an Alpha → Beta → MVP iterative build
Corporate clients onboarded during the MVP stage
Engineers on the build team were Euristiq’s, embedded with the founders
About the product Euristiq worked on
Fragmented corporate travel planning
Remote team members booked trips separately with no shared view, creating a lack of transparency, duplicated effort, and higher costs.
Manual expense tracking and reporting errors
Tracking travel expenses by hand led to budget overruns and reporting mistakes, with no automated way to categorize spending.
Time-consuming administrative work
Approvals, itinerary changes, and travel bookings required significant manual effort from both employees and managers.
An outdated interface holding back adoption
The existing interface didn’t meet modern user expectations, and inconsistent design was becoming a barrier to onboarding new corporate clients.
A development partner, not just a vendor
A centralized business travel management app that scales with corporate bookings
Streamlined management of corporate bookings and expenses
Manual management and tracking of travel expenses often result in budget overruns and reporting errors. Finch.travel eliminates these risks by automating expense tracking, offering cost-saving recommendations, and enforcing corporate travel policies to prevent unnecessary spending.
The platform automatically processes various expense documents, including electronic receipts and invoices, categorizing them into relevant groups such as flights, lodging, dining, and entertainment. Our team integrated OpenAI models to provide automated expense categorization and intelligent recommendations.
Users can upload scanned images or receive confirmation emails from hotels and airlines, with key details (date, amount, vendor) extracted automatically. This data syncs seamlessly with the overall expense list and can even integrate with users’ calendars to match booking dates. All information is securely stored in Amazon S3 buckets, ensuring scalability and reliability. To simplify accessibility, we developed an intuitive user interface, allowing users to view and manage their data effortlessly from any device.
Additionally, we utilized AWS Secrets Manager to securely store and manage keys for third-party libraries, adhering to best practices for sensitive data handling. This approach eliminates risks associated with hard-coded credentials, enhancing the platform’s security and maintainability. The result is a secure, efficient, and scalable solution that streamlines the management of corporate bookings and expenses.
Modernized design and elevated user experience
The client needed a complete redesign of their web app to modernize the user experience and align with current design trends. The previous interface was outdated, inconsistent, and failed to meet user expectations. A Euristiq designer was brought in to create a modern, user-friendly look and feel. User authentication was identified as a major bottleneck — to resolve this, we implemented AWS Cognito for secure, centralized user authentication. This solution streamlined the login process, improved test coverage for authentication workflows, and reduced setup time, resulting in a smoother user experience.
A recommendations engine with a AI-powered chatbot
We enhanced the platform with a recommendation engine that offers personalized suggestions, such as optimal departure times and budget forecasts, based on user history, current bookings, and real-time traffic or flight delay data.
In addition, we integrated a GPT-powered chatbot that provides context-aware responses to user queries (e.g., “Will I exceed my trip budget if I upgrade my hotel?”). This feature streamlines real-time decision-making, enhancing the user experience.
An OCR feature converts receipts and invoices into text, which is processed by a GPT-based model to extract key information like dates, amounts, and vendors. Results with low confidence are flagged for human review, ensuring accuracy in categorizing travel-related expenses.
Security built in from the MVP, not bolted on after
Finch onboarded its first 5
corporate clients in the MVP stage
5 corporate clients onboarded
Onboarded during the MVP stage, showing early product-market fit for the business travel management app.
Expense errors and budget overruns reduced
Automated expense tracking and categorization removed the manual reporting mistakes the team was fighting before.
Scalable, secure-by-default architecture
AWS Cognito authentication and Secrets Manager credential handling gave the MVP a security foundation built to scale, not to be rebuilt later.
Building an MVP and need a development partner who ships?
FAQ
How long does it take to build an MVP travel management app?
For Finch, it took about a year using an iterative Alpha → Beta → MVP approach. Two Euristiq engineers worked embedded with the client’s team, refining the platform in each phase rather than trying to ship every feature at once. By the MVP stage, the business travel management app had onboarded its first 5 corporate clients — proof the scope and timeline matched real business needs rather than a wish list.
What does a software development partner do for a pre-seed startup MVP?
A development partner owns the technical execution end-to-end — deciding the stack, architecture, and security model, then designing and building the product — while the founder owns the vision and business decisions. On Finch, that meant Euristiq engineers made the call on Node.js/NestJS and Angular, set up AWS Cognito and Secrets Manager for secure authentication, and handled UI/UX design, so the founding team could focus on customers rather than infrastructure.
How is travel expense data automatically categorized in a corporate travel app?
Finch’s app extracts data from uploaded receipts and confirmation emails using OCR, then a GPT-based model reads the extracted text to identify the date, amount, and vendor, and sorts each expense into categories like flights, lodging, or dining. Any low-confidence result is flagged for human review instead of being auto-approved, which keeps the automation fast without sacrificing accuracy on edge cases.
What tech stack works well for a corporate travel management app built as an MVP?
For Finch, the stack combined Node.js/NestJS and Angular on the application layer with AWS for infrastructure — Amazon S3 for document storage, AWS Cognito for authentication, and AWS Secrets Manager for credential handling — plus OpenAI models for expense categorization and the in-app chatbot. This combination kept the MVP fast to build while giving it a security and scalability foundation that didn’t need to be rebuilt after launch.
Recent cases
Powering a Vendor Management System Trusted by 400+ Brands
Corporate Travel Booking Software That Doubled Bookings and Cut Failed Payments by 34%
