Corporate Travel Portal Development

Scalable architecture for multi-role approvals, budget enforcement, and auditable workflows.

Overview

Enterprise travel requests needed policy alignment, budget controls, and transparent approvals. I defined the domain models, standardized API contracts, and deployed a workflow engine to coordinate steps from request to reconciliation.

Context

• Multi-tenant organizations with varying policies and cost centers
• Managers and finance approvers with different thresholds and SLAs
• Need for end-to-end traceability and exportable audit trails

Challenges

• Fragmented policy definitions and inconsistent enforcement
• Race conditions on budget consumption during peak booking periods
• Manual handoffs slowing down approvals

Approach

1. Policy modeling and enforcement
   • Centralized policy service; thresholds by traveler tier, route, and fare class
   • Pre-authorization checks invoked at request and revalidated at ticketing
2. Workflow engine
   • State machine with events for submit/approve/reject/amend
   • Parallel approvals (manager + finance) with timeouts and escalations
3. Budget integrity
   • Optimistic holds with time-boxed expirations; idempotent booking operations
   • Budget snapshots for reconciliation with finance systems
4. Visibility & auditability
   • Append-only audit log; export to CSV and SIEM
   • SLA dashboards for cycle time and bottleneck discovery

Reference Architecture

• Next.js frontend, Node/TS services, PostgreSQL
• Message queue for workflow events; Redis for ephemeral holds
• RBAC/SSO integration (SAML/OIDC)

Outcomes

• 37% faster approval cycle time (median)
• 22% reduction in out-of-policy requests reaching ticketing
• Complete audit trails enabling quicker finance close

Metrics

• Approval p50: 11h → 6.9h, p90: 2.3d → 1.4d
• Out-of-policy attempts blocked at request stage: +31%

Delivery Timeline

• Design & stakeholder alignment: 2 weeks
• Implementation & staging: 4 weeks
• Rollout & training: 1 week

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Looking to modernize corporate travel workflows? Let’s review approvals and budget governance together.