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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the other commenter that real-time daily approval doesn't seem to be a big selling point (I'm not sure it's even worth mentioning in marketing, because it might actually elicit negative reactions).

But the idea that the employee gets the money immediately/overnight upon approval at the end of the trip, or maybe weekly (for long trips), instead of waiting weeks for a paper check, is huge. As is offloading a lot of the accounting 'grunt work' of it to another company. And snapping photos of receipts with location and time data and categories directly attached, and not having to worry about where they're stored (it's all in the app and on servers) is a huge convenience too.

Sounds like an exciting idea.

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We use Concur at work and it's pretty painless. I scan most of my receipts with the app, usually in one big batch at the airport while I'm waiting around, do cleanup the next day (taxi/uber fare or parking receipts from the airport or whatever), and the reimbursement is included on my 2nd next paycheck at latest, which is direct-deposited anyway.

Maybe the incumbents are good for the enterprise and Abacus is for small/medium business?

With Abacus, you'd never have to worry about scanning receipts at the airport and "cleaning up" the next day to fit all your expenses into an arbitrary report because it was so quick and easy to do in real time, that not only did you submit it when it happened and throw away the receipt, but the money was in your bank account before you even got home from your business trip.

Thanks! Yea we don't think that employees should be used as a 'line of credit' for their employers. If you purchase something on your company's behalf, you should be reimbursed for that expense as quickly as possible.

What takes more time though? Quickly reviewing a listing of 20 expenses that an employee made on a trip and signing off, or getting an alert 5 times a day for 4 days for an expense that needs to be approved.

I think you guys under estimate how valuable a managers time is and that this doesn't actually save them time but puts the hassle of expenses from the employee to the manager.

It really depends on the expense volume, which is why we let managers set the frequency of notifications - for heavy volume sales organizations, they may prefer to review it as a daily digest, whereas for low volume founders, they expect to see everything real time. Abacus is as real time as you want it to be. We make it faster for employees to submit and managers to review.

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