ExpenseBay – Automating Weekly Expense Reports
Expense tracking and reporting is a common complaint from those who travel on company business, especially for salesmen and convention presenters. Several solutions for this exist, of course, but as technology advances, so does the way reporting takes place. Many businesses now expect near-real-time reporting from their employees and most who are incurring these businesses expenses definitely want fast payback.
ExpenseBay.com launched in July 2009 into public beta as an online Software as a Service (SaaS) solution to this problem and recently added another useful tool to their arsenal: the ability to use their Web app on your iPhone. Both the iPhone and online app are still in beta, but the software has managed to gain a core following.
ExpenseBay works as a sort of personal assistant online to quickly catalog, track, and report expenses easily and quickly to your home base. Reports can be given by time period (week, bi-week, month) or by pay period and results can be seen in real-time, as they are entered.
So the employee can quickly report their expenses and managers at corporate HQ can quickly see, in real time, who has incurred what expenses and approve them for reimbursement. In turn, the employee can see the approval and know when they’ll be reimbursed.
Transactions made by corporate credit card can also be automatically entered in ExpenseBay and receipt images can be entered via camera phone (text message) or with the iPhone app.
This is one of the more robust, useful, and fast learning curve products I’ve seen for expense tracking. Exports from ExpenseBay can be easily imported into many SaaS and offline payroll and management tools.
The app, for an enterprise that needs it, will likely prove itself invaluable. Accounts can be opened for free, with a basic account including a credit card account for tracking, and unlimited expense report and receipt storage. For mobile access, the price is $5/month and includes the Basic account features as well as the iPhone app. Pro accounts are $10/month and include 2 credit card accounts and many more features.
