Input

• Product initiative: Expense report automation for mid-market professional services firms
• Company: Nexum Consulting Group (600-person management consulting firm)
• Current pain point: Consultants submit expenses via spreadsheet; finance team spends ~40 hrs/week manually reconciling, reimbursements take 3-4 weeks, 12% error rate on submissions
• PM's starting point: No existing PRD — only a Slack thread from the CFO and a few complaints from project managers

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Output (abbreviated)

PRD Creation Chain: Expense Automation — Nexum Consulting Group

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Stage 1 — Discovery Questions /discovery-question-designer

Before writing a single requirement, answer these to bound the problem space:

User & Workflow Questions

• Who submits expenses — consultants only, or also admin staff submitting on behalf of partners?
• Do expense policies vary by client engagement type (T&M vs. fixed-fee)?
• What's the current approval chain? Does a project manager approve before finance, or does it go straight to finance?

Constraint & Integration Questions

• What ERP/accounting system does Nexum use today (NetSuite, SAP, QuickBooks)?
• Are corporate cards issued to consultants, or is this a reimbursement-only model?
• Is there a mobile requirement — do consultants submit from client sites?

Outcome & Success Questions

• What does "success" look like to the CFO at 6 months — reduced cycle time, headcount reallocation in finance, or audit readiness?
• What's the threshold error rate that would make this initiative a failure?
• Is this a build-internally initiative, or is procurement of a third-party tool (Concur, Expensify, Ramp) in scope?

PM decision point: Bring these into a 60-min working session with the CFO, Finance Ops lead, and two senior consultants before proceeding to the interview stage.

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Stage 2 — PRD Draft /prd-interviewer

Synthesized from structured 18-question interview with PM

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Product Requirements Document

Product: NexumExpense — Automated Expense Management Author: [PM Name] | Status: Draft v0.1 | Last updated: [Date] Stakeholders: CFO, VP Finance Operations, IT Director, Senior Consultant cohort

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Problem Statement

Nexum Consulting Group processes ~1,800 expense reports per month across 600 employees. The current spreadsheet-and-email workflow produces a 12% error rate, a 3–4 week reimbursement cycle, and consumes approximately 40 finance team hours weekly in manual reconciliation. This creates consultant dissatisfaction, cash-flow uncertainty for employees on extended client engagements, and audit exposure ahead of Nexum's planned SOC 2 Type II certification in Q3.

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Goals & Success Metrics

Goal	Metric	Target
Reduce reimbursement cycle time	Avg. days from submission to payment	≤ 7 days
Reduce submission error rate	% of reports requiring finance correction	< 2%
Reduce finance reconciliation burden	Hours/week spent on manual reconciliation	≤ 10 hrs
Consultant adoption	% of expenses submitted via new system at 90 days	≥ 85%
Audit readiness	Receipt attachment rate on submissions	100%

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Users & Personas

Primary — Field Consultant (Maya, Senior Consultant) Submits 8–15 expense line items per week, often from client offices or airports. Needs mobile receipt capture. Frustrated by reimbursement delays affecting personal cash flow.

Secondary — Finance Operations Analyst (Derek, Finance Ops) Processes and reconciles all submissions. Manually re-keys data into NetSuite. Primary beneficiary of automation. Needs exception flagging, policy enforcement at point of submission, and one-click NetSuite sync.

Tertiary — Engagement Manager (Approver) Approves project-coded expenses before they reach finance. Currently receives spreadsheet attachments via email; needs a queue-based approval flow with mobile support.

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Scope

In scope — MVP (Q2 launch)

• Mobile + web expense submission with OCR receipt scanning
• Policy rules engine (per diem limits, category restrictions, client-code validation)
• Two-tier approval workflow (Engagement Manager → Finance)
• NetSuite GL sync via API
• Reimbursement status visibility for submitters

Out of scope — MVP

• Corporate card reconciliation (Nexum evaluating card program separately, target Q4)
• Multi-currency (domestic US only for MVP; international engagements < 5% of volume)
• Self-service policy configuration by Finance (hardcoded rules in MVP, configurable in v1.1)

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Functional Requirements

Submission

• Consultants can photograph receipts via iOS/Android; OCR auto-populates merchant, amount, date
• System validates against policy rules on submission (not on review) and surfaces violations inline
• Consultant must select client engagement code from active project list (pulled from NetSuite project table)

Approval Workflow

• Submissions route to Engagement Manager assigned to selected project code
• Engagement Manager has 48-hr SLA; auto-escalates to Finance if no action taken
• Finance reviewer sees policy violations flagged with severity (block vs. warn)

Integration

• NetSuite sync: approved expenses post to GL within 2 hrs of finance approval
• Sync failures surface in Finance dashboard with retry capability; do not silently drop

Notifications

• Submitter notified at: submission confirmed, EM approved, finance approved, reimbursement initiated
• Notification channel: email (required) + in-app (required) + Slack (optional, user preference)

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Non-Functional Requirements

• Availability: 99.5% uptime during business hours (8am–8pm ET)
• Receipt storage: 7-year retention per Nexum document retention policy
• Security: SOC 2 Type II compliant hosting required; receipts encrypted at rest and in transit
• Performance: Receipt OCR result returned within 5 seconds on LTE connection

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Open Questions

1. Will Nexum issue a corporate card program by Q4? If yes, MVP must not create technical debt that blocks card reconciliation integration.
2. Does the approval workflow need a "delegate" capability for Engagement Managers on PTO?
3. What is the NetSuite API rate limit for Nexum's current license tier?

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Stage 3 — PRD Review /prd-review

Section Audit

Section	Rating	Finding
Problem Statement	✅ Strong	Specific, quantified, tied to business event (SOC 2). No rewrite needed.
Goals & Metrics	✅ Strong	Targets are measurable and time-bound. Consider adding a baseline column for comparison.
Personas	⚠️ Needs work	Derek's persona lacks a frustration statement; reads like a role description, not a user story.
Scope	✅ Strong	In/out of scope clearly delineated. Rationale for exclusions present.
Functional Requirements	⚠️ Needs work	Approval workflow section missing: what happens when EM rejects (not just ignores) a submission? No rejection/resubmission flow defined.
Non-Functional Requirements	✅ Strong	Retention and security requirements tied to real compliance context.
Open Questions	⚠️ Needs work	Q3 is too technical for a PRD; move to a separate technical discovery doc. Replace with a business-level question about international expansion timeline.

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Rewritten Sections

Derek Persona (rewritten)

Derek processes 1,800+ expense reports monthly. His core frustration isn't volume — it's invisible errors. He only discovers policy violations or missing receipts after an EM has already approved, forcing him to chase consultants who are back on client sites. He needs the system to be the enforcer so he can be the exception handler.

Rejection Flow (added to Functional Requirements — Approval Workflow)

• If an Engagement Manager rejects a submission, submitter receives a notification with the rejection reason (required free-text field for EM)
• Rejected report returns to "Draft" status; submitter can edit and resubmit, which restarts the approval timer
• Finance can view rejection history on any report for audit trail purposes

**Open Question