Travel Technology - Business Travel, Expense Reports, Billing Cycles, Receipts and related

Travelling extensively in the consulting world the biggest pain is expense reports to be created, categorized and sent to the employer with receipts etc on a timely basis.

These expenses pan out over several credit cards.. ranging from taxi cabs, meals, rental cars, hotels, phone/cell bills etc.

At the moment I used EXCEL but find it not as efficient.

Is there a better way that someone has done this? Quickbooks, MS Money or something similar ?

What I am thinking is.. most of my online card / account bills can be downloaded as CSV or Excel and maybe imported into the software etc.

I will probably find an efficient way of automating this, but I'd rather hear out some insights from people who might already have found a good way.

ALSO:

Has anyone found a better way to 'modify' the billing cycle of CREDIT CARDS & TELEPHONE / INTERNET / CELL PHONE BILLS such that they would fall into such monthly cycles that would help their reimbursement alignment ?

Any ideas welcome :).

PS: I dont know of one yet but I have heard that with some companies the cards are provided by the employer directly paid off by the employer support staff in a more SEAMLESS manner. Who does this?

Has anyone found a better way to 'modify' the billing cycle of CREDIT CARDS & TELEPHONE / INTERNET / CELL PHONE BILLS such that they would fall into such monthly cycles that would help their reimbursement alignment ? Call and ask?

I just got the new USAirways World MC. The first thing I did was send an email off to customer service asking about the billing cycle dates, with a mention that a due date between the 5th and 12th of the month would be ideal. I got a quick replay back saying that my due date was the 10th.

Why do you spread your expenses out over several cards? Find one that works (cash back; miles/points) and use it.

The Palm Expense application works very well, it's very simple and easy to use, and integrates nicely with an Excel spreadsheet, (Sync Palm and PC > Open an expense report in Excel > Run Excel macro to read expense data > Data is populated in correct rows and columns of spreadhseet).

Using it falls into the keep it simple approach, if everytime you incur an expense, you quickly repord it in the Palm app, or record everything at the end of the workday. Maybe someone else can chime in here, because I'm still using it on an M515, which is about three years old. I don't know if that particular app has been carried forward to the newer models/newer Palm OSes.

I have 2 spreadsheets. 1 that I enter every receipt in, and 1 that is my expense report template.

I enter every receipt first,then over the weekend update the expense report.

Tedious, yes, but there is no short cut. I don't trust downloading because of credit card errors (I've caught several in the last few months amounting to several hundred dollars).

Travelling extensively in the consulting world the biggest pain is expense reports to be created, categorized and sent to the employer with receipts etc on a timely basis.


This is one of the reasons I am thankful I was only in pseudo-consulting (my word for consulting industry sans travel and billable clients). My firm used Diner's club which took care of reimbursement- I got the money back to my paycheck instantly and then received the Diners club bill addressed to me later.

This is one of the reasons I am thankful I was only in pseudo-consulting (my word for consulting industry sans travel and billable clients). My firm used Diner's club which took care of reimbursement- I got the money back to my paycheck instantly and then received the Diners club bill addressed to me later.

I'd like that to happen. Anyone know of consulting firms that do this? I remember a friend of mine at HP told me about this.