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.
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.
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.
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?
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.