Show HN: Abacus – Killing The Expense Report
abacus.com
abacus.com
This solves one of my major problems, after a week or two on the road, I invariably lose a receipt or two.
But I wonder if it solves my other problems?
- expenses that don't have receipts, like unattended exact change toll booths, or when I use my old MTA card (which still has money on it!) to get around NYC, so I don't have a receipt for buying or filling up a new card, or grumpy cab drivers that provide a receipt, etc.
- driving expenses, this is a big problem with expensify, which is geared to either use their embedded gps directions to calculate distance (which is never the route I use so it's always off by quite a few miles), or the honor system which is usually just a best estimate. The other night I went on google and actually laid out the exact route I took on a recent drive and found out that my honor system reported mileage was off by about 2 miles. I'd love to be able to get in my car and hit "expense driving" and have it track my path and use that as the submission.
- separating out expenses on a receipt. My company doesn't reimburse booze, so a dinner out while travelling, with a beer, means I have to manually remove the booze charge from my expense and recalculate the taxes etc. Or if I'm out with one of my friends who works for the government, and I pick up the tab via credit and he pays me back for his portion in cash (the ethics are pretty strong on this) how do I deal with this?
I've found that expense reporting systems get complicated for these reasons.
Also, I definitely do not want it connected to my bank account.
Receipts aren't required. If you're worried about an IRS audit it's important to have receipts (images) for transactions over $75, but for anything under that it's up to the company / employee.
Some of the other stuff (mileage reimbursement, splitting expenses on a receipt) are good points but are also largely responsible for why some of the other tools out there are so heavy and complicated. We might try to address these use cases in the future, but for now we're trying to keep Abacus as simple as possible. You can use the expense note to add this sort of context.
Curious why you don't want to connect your bank account to get paid back? We take security very seriously, your bank details are stored with PCI DSS certified processor and never touch our servers.
Most of my employers like the have at least scanned images of the receipts or a cropped screenshot of a credit card transaction showing the expense. Beyond IRS requirements, most places just use them to add a layer of verification that the expense is warranted and correct (I'm not claiming $15 for lunch when it cost me $7 or something). Being able to just shoot a photo of it with my phone might be enough?
> We might try to address these use cases in the future, but for now we're trying to keep Abacus as simple as possible. You can use the expense note to add this sort of context.
Yeah, all that stuff is definitely what makes expenses a PIA. Glad to see you're keeping things focused. A "expense this drive" that uses GPS tracking to calculate mileage would be a cool feature though.
> Curious why you don't want to connect your bank account to get paid back? We take security very seriously, your bank details are stored with PCI DSS certified processor and never touch our servers.
Definitely not a knock against you guys or your precautions. It's just not a feature I would use personally.
Maybe I'm a luddite, but autobillpay and other electronic transaction systems are something I try to avoid where possible in favor of getting a check and depositing it myself. It's not a decision I've ever come to regret and having an extra audit trail on my end has come in handy several times over disputes -- besides, I get a nice walk to the bank out of it.
note I've already sent your URL out to a few people already! Good luck and awesome idea!
Yup, adding a photo of the receipt is part of expense creation in Abacus. In 2006 a new law was passed that made a photo of a receipt (like the one stored in Abacus) the legal equivalent of a paper receipt, so you no longer have to save the paper copy.
Thanks for the feedback and sharing Abacus!
In terms of quantifiable differences, it’s way faster for employees to submit and get reimbursed because we've extrapolated away the need to even create an expense report (submit on the fly), managers can review and approve right from the mobile and for the accountants, everything is on autopilot (accounting autosyncs in the background nightly, payouts are tied to approval and go out nightly, communications go out to employees with payout status immediately, etc.)
That's my biggest complaint with Expensify. Great, my report is approved... now what? There is little indication to me, as an employee, of what happens next or when it will take place.
I used to have the awful job of auditing executive expense reports at a fortune 10 company. One major problem is that employees submit expenses, and managers approve them, but they don't comply with IRS guidelines for deductibility. For instance, an employee just submits a expense for a $300 dinner, and it is approved by his manager.
One area where you could really stand out from the competition is guiding people to do the right thing, e.g. list the number of people that attended the dinner and a few names and titles of the attendees.
That being said, we have built in something we're pretty excited about which is commenting, where managers and employees can communicate right from the phones on specific transactions (kind of like sending a text) to clarify and approve rather than reject and force the employee to start over.
We're also psyched to start building what my co-founder Ted likes to think of as 'data snacks', where we surface relevant insights based on the situation, e.g. you're 80% of the way through your monthly budget, which is really what we've heard companies at that particular stage value most.
For instance, if you have "Dinner, $300", that can be a problem. If you have "Dinner, $3,000, 10 attendees, incl. Larry Page - CEO Google", the IRS will have no problem, even though it is a $300/pp dinner.
Expensify makes the "old school" expense/reimbursement process easier. Expensify lets me collect my receipts, fill out electronic expense reports, submit such reports to my supervisor at the end of each month, wait for his approval, then wait for the finance dept's approval, then wait another 15 days for the deposit. I was a big fan of Expensify because they still made my life easier. But to me, Expensify improves on a pretty awesome dredful process.
Abacus introduces a whole new expense/reimbursement paradigm that focuses on "now". As a user of Abacus, I know if I put in my expense as it happens, I'll get reimbursed right away. This really motivates me to do my expenses now rather than put it off until the end of the month (which also means I'm less likely to lose a receipt).
There is an inflection point in the size of a company / the type and quantity of expenses where this starts to make sense.
In order to address the market that doesn't do a lot of expensing, maybe would be useful to have this be a dashboard of sorts that pulls the CC transactions from your team and presents them in order to get better categorization.
We definitely have an issue now where it's hard to identify charges from the laundry list transaction report.
The company in question is 'eagerly trying to fix the problems' as a mail to all German employees stated a couple of hours earlier today.
I would love to move to a better solution.
Unfortunately it seems the service here, as so often the case, is US only - or US centric. Are there any comparable services that I could submit to my superiors with a smile, while I point at the rotten mess that is our current system? Fellow Europeans, how are you doing your expenses?
Sorry to hear about the trouble you're having with your current solution!
We used Abacus last week for a few travel expenses - it worked flawlessly. What took time and organizational hassle was now done in about 15 seconds.
"BY REGISTERING FOR AND/OR USING THE SERVICES IN ANY MANNER, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO VISITING OR BROWSING THE SITE, YOU AGREE TO THESE TERMS OF SERVICE AND ALL OTHER OPERATING RULES, POLICIES AND PROCEDURES THAT MAY BE PUBLISHED FROM TIME TO TIME ON THE SITE BY US, EACH OF WHICH IS INCORPORATED BY REFERENCE AND EACH OF WHICH MAY BE UPDATED FROM TIME TO TIME WITHOUT NOTICE TO YOU."
"VISITING OR BROWSING THE SITE"? Is this typical and is it actually enforceable?
Why are /you/ doing it? Why do you think it is justified?
Yes yes, this whole scenario sounds kinda dumb, but I honestly don't see anything inherently wrong with applying the ToS upon visiting the page. Puts the creator in the legal safe-zone.
I hate to be the conservative one here, but I thought I'd share my initial reaction. Might want to save those photos for the company profile page?
Our iOS and Android apps are fully native and built using objective-c and java.
What does your early customer look like? What size organization?
How will you get big companies with large sales teams to adopt Abacus?
Did I read in the comments that you can link to my corporate card charges? That would be ideal.
Most of our early customers are ~5-100 employee companies. Right now most of our customers are other startups because that's who we know, but we're excited to expand to other organizations.
We're gradually adding features for larger organizations — we just introduced a 'groups' feature for splitting organizations into teams, and we're building out our bookkeeping sync (Quickbooks, Xero).
We're also working on the ability to pull in your card charges. For personal cards you'll be able to promote an expense as 'reimbursable'. For corporate cards all expenses will get automatically pulled in as 'non reimbursable' (because the company already pays the card bill).
Can't wait for the CC feature. Awesome!
Now if you could just get rid of the traditional timesheet too, it would be the perfect app! (I hate doing timesheets every week too. Over the years I've used more than a dozen different official timesheet-timetracking tools at various companies and all of them sucked.)
I'd be curious about doing an A/B test on the CTA at the bottom of the page. That thin grey box around the sign up doesn't really stand out. Try some color to make it pop. Optimizly makes that super easy to prototype.
And at $8/month you get Travel & Expense functionality including TripIt pro with basic reporting included.
So, we LinkedIn stalked a junior IT guy, worked our way up to an IT manager, who then passed us off to someone in legal that after 4 months of continuous follow-up agreed to sell it to us.