Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

I can't find the app to see exactly how it worked, but did it have any integrations with expense reporting systems? As someone who files expense reports monthly for work, that would be the biggest issue for me - if it doesn't have a hook into QuickBooks or whatever system the company is using, then it's not going to get an enterprise following since users still have to manually enter info, which decreases value a lot.

The other issue is that if, like me, you travel a lot then a large number of your receipts will be in emails or PDFs (I book airfare and hotels online, and take Uber instead of cabs), so taking pictures of paper receipts and tracking driving miles would only get me half-way to completion.

View on HN

They didn't mention this in the article, which makes me wonder if they really understood it. Companies have specific tools they require you to use to file expense reports. You would have to get the entire company to embrace this solution. Although they talk about the CTO trying to get it installed, I wonder if they ever really got the whole company on board. You've got to get the CTO and the CFO in this case.

It just doesn't work that way, the best audience for this is big co (because the combination of strict expense rules and big sales force makes it perfect) and yet it is absolutely impossible to get an enterprise signed into something like this.

Yet when the sales guys are putting in their expense reports every month (because it's too much money to ignore it for longer than a month) you could save them time with something like this, and guess what, they can expense the cost too, but only if you give them a report that is ready to send in the format they need it.

I'm the target market for this app, as I lose hundreds of dollars a month in unclaimed expenses.

This is completely useless for me, it was as an app and even more so as a slack bot - I work in the sales department of a large co (as will the most profitable segment for this kind of app) and here's the things you would need for anyone at my workplace to use it:

- Concur integration of some kind, otherwise your "beautiful" PDF Is useless, because my expense department will not pay anything without the proper cover sheet.

- As you said, you want to give me some kind of email address* that I can forward an uber, air or hotel booking to and it will automagically add it to my expense report.

- Slack-only rules out the entire big co space as it doesn't run behind corporate firewall, so it's not allowed. If you want to integrate with a chat solution, go for Chatter, Yammer or Lync... or better yet, use email.

* Why email? because it's standard, and it's the way sales people are used to send tickets to salesforce.

True that. Before moving to an "invisible app", we were developing integrations for such accounting software, and we had an email forwarding function as Uber was also a big part of the expenses filed on our app. Still, a SaaS like ours had a hard time living only on mobile, and through our own mobile app

Reply on news.ycombinator.com