So, I'm a manager, and the last thing I want is to have fifteen different notifications coming to me in real-time asking me to approve one of my team member's gas receipt. I'd much rather get the batch after the trip. Not sure how this would be an improvement on the manager end.
Hey I'm one of the Abacus co-founders — we hear you on not wanting to get blasted with a bunch of notifications. As a manger, it's up to you to decide how you want to review expenses. You can review them as they come in, but you can also flip off those notifications and review them daily or weekly. We also provide lots of context so you can group by user, category, trip, etc. At Abacus we like to do stuff real-time, but our goal isn't to prescribe one way of doing things — we want to give you the flexibility to do things in whatever way works best for you.
Plus if you're really keen to approve expense receipts in real time then the Oracle/Blackberry combo works fine.
Funnily enough the least painful expense report I've ever had to send simply involved filling in a spreadsheet, which lacked the abundance of compulsory fields that software designed for proper expense auditing seems to have.
The automated bank account monitoring sounds like the biggest potential timesaver, but it also sounds like something I really don't want to grant to my employer.
Yea — we're trying to avoid the bajillion separate fields you have to enter, typical of Oracle or Concur. We try to do some smart things — for example if you're at a place (gas station, restaurant, etc.) you can select the place from our 'nearby' list with one tap, and then we're working on using that location data to automatically categorize the transaction, put it on a map, etc.
I hear you on not wanting to grant your employer access to all your card data. Your employer will only be able to see the transactions that you pass through to them as business expenses.
I've lost days of my life to the Oracle expense processing "solution". This is no exaggeration either, and I would guess that most companies using it are losing a surprising amount of their employee's time and energy fighting it.
It's particularly inept at dealing with international situations like different currencies or compliance requirements, but the interface as a whole is an archaic mess.
The news that someone, anyone, wants to walk in and disrupt this nonsense is music to my ears.
I agree, I can't see the approver's perspective on this one. I sent you a gas receipt today, and I send you a bunch more receipts tomorrow, and some more the following day. How do you know which transactions are legitimate if you're getting them piecewise and not for the whole trip (i.e. bombard the approver with requests so they can't tell falsified charges)?
Just because expenses aren't submitted in batch, doesn't mean you can't approve them in batch.
Having more transparency into incoming expenses is proving to be helpful for managers. What frequently happens in companies today is that people sit on receipts for months on end. As a manager, when you get receipts from two months ago, how do you know if that is a valid expense? And how do you budget for expenses when there is so much delay? Many managers have to hunt down their teammates and remind them to get expenses in before they close the books, because all this delay makes bookkeeping harder.
As an employee, when you're entering expenses from a trip 2 months ago, how do you remember what the expense was for? What if you lose the receipts?
Oh okay, so you can approve in batch (I also read your other reply about roll up notifications). That makes more sense now, and I can see why this system makes sense.
My previous companies were super rigid about expense reports to avoid any of these problems so I never knew they were problems for some people. You only had so long after your trip was complete, so there would be no "expense report from 2 months ago", and only a minimal delay before getting the quarter's numbers for travel and training. If you had a corporate card, it had to be reconciled each statement for accounting to directly pay the card, otherwise you were on the hook for the balance and responsible for getting it reimbursed to you.
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So, I'm a manager, and the last thing I want is to have fifteen different notifications coming to me in real-time asking me to approve one of my team member's gas receipt. I'd much rather get the batch after the trip. Not sure how this would be an improvement on the manager end.
Hey I'm one of the Abacus co-founders — we hear you on not wanting to get blasted with a bunch of notifications. As a manger, it's up to you to decide how you want to review expenses. You can review them as they come in, but you can also flip off those notifications and review them daily or weekly. We also provide lots of context so you can group by user, category, trip, etc. At Abacus we like to do stuff real-time, but our goal isn't to prescribe one way of doing things — we want to give you the flexibility to do things in whatever way works best for you.
Plus if you're really keen to approve expense receipts in real time then the Oracle/Blackberry combo works fine.
Funnily enough the least painful expense report I've ever had to send simply involved filling in a spreadsheet, which lacked the abundance of compulsory fields that software designed for proper expense auditing seems to have.
The automated bank account monitoring sounds like the biggest potential timesaver, but it also sounds like something I really don't want to grant to my employer.
Yea — we're trying to avoid the bajillion separate fields you have to enter, typical of Oracle or Concur. We try to do some smart things — for example if you're at a place (gas station, restaurant, etc.) you can select the place from our 'nearby' list with one tap, and then we're working on using that location data to automatically categorize the transaction, put it on a map, etc.
I hear you on not wanting to grant your employer access to all your card data. Your employer will only be able to see the transactions that you pass through to them as business expenses.
I've lost days of my life to the Oracle expense processing "solution". This is no exaggeration either, and I would guess that most companies using it are losing a surprising amount of their employee's time and energy fighting it.
It's particularly inept at dealing with international situations like different currencies or compliance requirements, but the interface as a whole is an archaic mess.
The news that someone, anyone, wants to walk in and disrupt this nonsense is music to my ears.
I agree, I can't see the approver's perspective on this one. I sent you a gas receipt today, and I send you a bunch more receipts tomorrow, and some more the following day. How do you know which transactions are legitimate if you're getting them piecewise and not for the whole trip (i.e. bombard the approver with requests so they can't tell falsified charges)?
Just because expenses aren't submitted in batch, doesn't mean you can't approve them in batch.
Having more transparency into incoming expenses is proving to be helpful for managers. What frequently happens in companies today is that people sit on receipts for months on end. As a manager, when you get receipts from two months ago, how do you know if that is a valid expense? And how do you budget for expenses when there is so much delay? Many managers have to hunt down their teammates and remind them to get expenses in before they close the books, because all this delay makes bookkeeping harder.
As an employee, when you're entering expenses from a trip 2 months ago, how do you remember what the expense was for? What if you lose the receipts?
Oh okay, so you can approve in batch (I also read your other reply about roll up notifications). That makes more sense now, and I can see why this system makes sense.
My previous companies were super rigid about expense reports to avoid any of these problems so I never knew they were problems for some people. You only had so long after your trip was complete, so there would be no "expense report from 2 months ago", and only a minimal delay before getting the quarter's numbers for travel and training. If you had a corporate card, it had to be reconciled each statement for accounting to directly pay the card, otherwise you were on the hook for the balance and responsible for getting it reimbursed to you.