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Expense management/reporting tools [consolidated threads]

Expense management/reporting tools [consolidated threads]

Old May 5, 2014, 3:38 am
  #16  
 
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Originally Posted by JMN57
Unfortunately, I am not finding anything that breaks out a hotel bill into separate line items (lodging, meal (billable), meal (non-billable), laundry...)
That is definitely possible, look for an "Itemization". It drives me crazy that I have to do it for each stay
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Old Oct 31, 2016, 11:26 pm
  #17  
 
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Angry Expense report tool ranting/raving

I hate the way my company tracks expenses. We "built" something in house and it is SUPER difficult to track and submit expenses because it takes a million clicks to get one expense done.

We are a pretty small shop and I only travel about 1X a month. I like everyone I work with. But the thought of filing my report is one which makes my skin crawl.

(Think Excel and Word and lots of manual scanning of receipts)


Please tell me I am not alone here with this!
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Old Nov 7, 2016, 9:40 pm
  #18  
 
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Originally Posted by alicegator
I hate the way my company tracks expenses. We "built" something in house and it is SUPER difficult to track and submit expenses because it takes a million clicks to get one expense done.

We are a pretty small shop and I only travel about 1X a month. I like everyone I work with. But the thought of filing my report is one which makes my skin crawl.

(Think Excel and Word and lots of manual scanning of receipts)


Please tell me I am not alone here with this!
Don't feel bad - I work for one of the largest employers in the world. We use an Excel spreadsheet for expense reports, and I have to scotch tape my receipts to printer paper in order to send them to an offsite location so they can scan them to India to process the expense payment.

It's the most inefficient thing I've ever seen in my life. The dumbest part is, we have Concur for booking travel, why on earth can't we use it for expenses?

The amount of waste is deplorable. Wasting my time, wasting the time and money paying someone else to scan it, and a third person to process it. Wasting paper. Wasting scotch tape. Wasting a UPS expense to get these receipts elsewhere for processing. I seriously think this is like from the 80's or something.

I entertain some of the other folks in the office by singing the "picture pages" theme song while I'm taping receipts to paper.
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Old Jan 11, 2017, 10:12 am
  #19  
 
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Originally Posted by alicegator
I hate the way my company tracks expenses. We "built" something in house and it is SUPER difficult to track and submit expenses because it takes a million clicks to get one expense done.

We are a pretty small shop and I only travel about 1X a month. I like everyone I work with. But the thought of filing my report is one which makes my skin crawl.

(Think Excel and Word and lots of manual scanning of receipts)


Please tell me I am not alone here with this!
You are not alone. I have the same issue. I wish I could use one of the previous mentioned providers. I checked expensecloud and expensify, but they are not as customazable as I need it. Will check concur, maybe they are better.

At the end of every month I spend a personal day to do expenses. With this services and apps I could just snap a picture as the expenses occur and be done within a few mouse clicks not hours of filling out a spread sheet and scanning dozens of receipts :/
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Old Jan 11, 2017, 2:37 pm
  #20  
 
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We use a 2 part process. One is to create the expense report in our PeopleSoft system. The nice thing is that they have it directly integrated to our corporate AmEx card accounts, so all charges flow through to PS. It's a lengthy process, though, to create a report - select charges, confirm/change category, manually break out hotel bills (lodging, food, incidentals, etc.), match to billing code, download summary, submit.

Part 2 is sending over the receipts. Fortunately, we no longer have to do the manual way of taping receipts to a sheet of paper, scanning them, and faxing them over to whatever group processes them. We can now scan to whatever app, create a pdf, and email to the expense mgmt group, although the subject and message body need to contain specific information to tie to the expense report.

I've been using Smart Receipts on my Android it meets my needs.

I'm told we'll be moving to a cloud-based/SaaS finance system this year which will allow for mobile expense reporting.

So full disclosure - my admin submits all my expense reports, so I just need to send her my receipts and she does the rest. But I tried it a couple of times and it's pretty onerous.
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Old Jan 24, 2018, 5:54 pm
  #21  
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ABUKAI Expenses Mobile Application

Hi Rick,

You can use ABUKAI Expenses for your expense reports. ABUKAI Expenses eliminates all the cumbersome work associated with creating expense reports including typing data from receipts, categorizing expenses and looking up exchange rates. ABUKAI's mobile application auto-magically reads out your receipts and turns them into an expense report. You may download and try the free version here - abukai.com/install. It also works on international receipts, unlike other servics out there.

Last edited by TWA884; Jan 27, 2018 at 5:25 pm Reason: Remove HTML code, formatting
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Old Feb 3, 2018, 10:10 am
  #22  
 
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Expensify

I use Expensify)

Find it quite easy to use. expensify.com
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Old Oct 8, 2018, 8:08 am
  #23  
 
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Simpler alternative to Expensify

I'm an occasional Expensify user. I like its receipt-scanning and OCR features and its Android app integration, and I find it reasonably easy to put together an expense report. I don't like its utterly mystifying user interface and I find its "Concierge" feature really annoying -- cheery greetings from robots just rub me the wrong way.

My account is set up to be billable only in months where I actually use it. I noticed I'd been billed for three months when I had no activity, and once I figured out how to raise an issue in the Concierge page, I got a reply saying "It looks like you have Scheduled Submit enabled, which has resulted in your Expensify monthly receipt being added to your most recent Open Report. Unfortunately, this has been counted as billable activity - even though you may not have physically used Expensify on your end!" I've written back asking how to disable that feature, which I can't find with a quick trawl through the menus. [EDIT] Writing this inspired me to look again. I found and disabled the feature.

They say they're refunding the three months, though one message makes me suspect this is going to show up as a credit which it may take me quite a while to use up.

I'd be delighted to make this the last straw and abandon the system if I could find a simple replacement. All I want is the ability to snap receipts with my phone, import and, ideally, OCR them, and compile the results into reports. If someone can recommend an alternative that costs no more than my Expensify account (currently $8.33 for each active month), I'd love to give it a try.

Any suggestions?
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Old Oct 8, 2018, 9:02 am
  #24  
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Maybe a silly question, but why not use the free version of Expensify? I've never paid a penny and I've used it for years. As far as I know, it's free if you are a single user.
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Old Oct 8, 2018, 10:52 am
  #25  
 
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Originally Posted by DYKWIA
Maybe a silly question, but why not use the free version of Expensify? I've never paid a penny and I've used it for years. As far as I know, it's free if you are a single user.
I had a free account years ago, but at some point they reduced the free feature set and made some of the functionality originally available to free users only available via a paid program.
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Old Oct 8, 2018, 11:48 am
  #26  
 
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Originally Posted by DYKWIA
Maybe a silly question, but why not use the free version of Expensify? I've never paid a penny and I've used it for years. As far as I know, it's free if you are a single user.
As Dodge said, the free version limits the receipt OCR feature -- to five receipts per month, if I remember right.
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Old Oct 11, 2018, 6:55 am
  #27  
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Originally Posted by ajGoes
As Dodge said, the free version limits the receipt OCR feature -- to five receipts per month, if I remember right.
Ah yes, good point. The OCR never seemed to work for me. However, I tried it again recently, and it seemed to work fine. The good thing was that the 5 per month were cumulative, so I had 120 free ones to use up
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Old Oct 11, 2018, 7:05 am
  #28  
 
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Originally Posted by DYKWIA
Ah yes, good point. The OCR never seemed to work for me. However, I tried it again recently, and it seemed to work fine. The good thing was that the 5 per month were cumulative, so I had 120 free ones to use up
Wait a second. I'm sure they weren't accumulating back when I signed up for the paid plan. I guess I should drop that one now.
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Old Oct 11, 2018, 7:25 am
  #29  
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Originally Posted by ajGoes
Wait a second. I'm sure they weren't accumulating back when I signed up for the paid plan. I guess I should drop that one now.


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Old Oct 11, 2018, 8:50 am
  #30  
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Moving the thread to "Travel Tools", as there is a consolidated expense reporting tool thread in that forum.
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