Features
Login securely and remain logged in if you want
You log in with your email address and password and if you want to your login will be remembered on that computer for two weeks meaning that if you are the only one using that computer you don't have to enter your login credentials every time you return.
User specific spending limits
There are two types of spending limits:
1. spending warnings
2. limits that prevent users from submitting the expense for approval
The spending limits are set on particular user which makes it possible to have different
spending limits for different people if there's a need for that.
Company sites
You can tag all colleagues to belong to different company sites so that from a management point of view you can get a clear overview of which sites which colleagues belong to.
Expense categories
Every expense you enter must belong to a category that works as the primary
classification of what the expense is, e.g. Travel or Milage.
You can specify not only the category name but also a "mobile alias" that can help
making the entry easier when typing is limited or restricted like it can be with a
mobile phone keypad.
Each category also features a default VAT that will help to suggest the right VAT
when you enter expenses and want to let the computer guess the correct VAT from just
entering the amount.
For each category that needs it you can specify sub-categories which is the same
as categories but one level deeper. This makes it possible to limit the primary list of
options with the ability to have further fine-grained detail on the categories.
Expense projects
This is for when you want to label various expenses under the same project which makes it later possible to see exactly how much expenses people incur on the various projects.
Expense vendors
By classifying which vendor was used for which expense makes it possible to see exactly how much money is spent on various vendors and suppliers. For every expense vendor you can define an accounts code which can be used to integrate with Sage™ or SAP™.
Milage
A milage expense works on top of the functionality of the expenses with image except that you also have to specify how many miles you travelled and what vehicle was used for that particular journey.
A company administrator is responsible for predefining how much the compensation should be for each driven mile with the various vehicles and various fuel types. The company administrator will be asked to specify these values before and after 10,000 miles because the VAT changes after a employee has driven more than 10,000 miles in one financial year. The employee entering the miles will not have to worry about remembering if she has driven less or more than 10,000 miles. The system works that out automatically.
Your mobile numbers
Depending on how you chose to upload the expense images you take if you chose to
send them directly from your phone using an application, that application will tag your
sent image with the originator number (also known as MSISN). Here you can
specify what your mobile number is so that uploaded images land on the correct login account.
The number can be specified with or without an internation dialing code, it will still be
matched and any duplicates across the system will be stopped to avoid confusion.
Preferred configurations
The administrator specifies what input fields on the expense entry page should be visible and which should be required. Depending on the users' access priviliges they can chose which one they prefer to use. For example, for an travelling salesman who goes abroad a lot it might be wise to chose a configuration with Country, Exchange rate and Currency.
Individual email reminders
To make sure users don't forget about submitting all of their expenses or completing those that aren't an optional weekly or monthly email reminder is sent via email to point out what needs to be done. Depending on your role you can have more reminders like for example a monthly reminder about how many expenses you have yet to approve if applicable. No reminders are sent if no actions are needed by the user.
Complete report
The complete report is only accessible by those with administrator right or the right to
approve or pay for other users expenses. The report gives a complete list all expenses
that have been approved or paid for with the option to filter the selection down based
on very specific filtering requirements, e.g. "Only Credit card expenses, between 1st April and 3rd April by Fred."
The report is always first shown summorised with the total figures with the option to
expand and see the whole table of expenses. This becomes very useful since the table can
become very large until you have set a filter that limits the selection.
Complete report grouped
Using the same underlying data as the Complete report
but this time grouped under a selected variable such as Category. This gives you a pie
chart and a table showing the total amount divided by each Category for example.
By changing the grouping variable to group by you can see what user has the most
expenses or which vendors cost the most or which projects incur the most expenses.
Like the Complete report you can filter the selection before you generate the pie chart
and the summary table so for example you can see in which country most expenses were
made in April of 2009.
Credit Card Reconcilliation
The Credit Card Reconcilliation is a form of report where you can upload a CSV file given to you from VISA™, Mastercard™ or American Express™ for a particular user and perform a reconcilliation against all approved expenses for this user to make sure that every credit card expense is accounted for correctly in the system. To do the actual reconcilliation you select the CSV file and for each row in the file the system searches for the correct expense using the date and the amount.
Export to Sage™
For those who use Sage™ in the back-end they can export their expenses into
Sage™ and not have to worry about the correct format. Since every expense category,
project and vendor can be defined with a accounts code, if you want to export to Sage™
you use the accounts code fields to match what you use in Sage™. Every user can also
be defined with her specific Sage™ accounts code.
When you make a Sage™ export, the system will automatically recognize which accounts
codes you haven't defined correctly yet of thoses expenses that get exported.
Homepage
When you log in you are taken to the homepage/dashboard where you get a clear
overview of what you can do, have done and should do next. If you have incomplete expenses
that need your attention or expenses that you need to approve they will be listed here so
that you don't have to figure out what action next to take.
If you have unpaid cash expenses owed to you by the company you get an immediate summation
of that on the homepage together with a humble reminder of what your role is and what
priviliges you have.
Enter and complete expense
You can enter the expense images in many ways. If you have the expense image as a file
on your computer you can upload it and then complete the details on the screen. Expenses can
be entered without images if need be. You can also upload PDF of PostScript documents
which are automatically converted to an image of the first page (the original document is also saved)
which makes it easy to quickly read the information from the PDF as you're completing
the details.
If you have multiple expense images or perhaps a ZIP file full of expense images you can
upload them all in one go. When you're about to do this the system will immediately
recognize what you're about to do and offer you the ability to enter something that is
common for all images, like a batch of images from a trip to France such that you don't
want to have to specify Country being France for every expense image once all uploaded.
When you complete the expense you get a preview of the image on screen next to the form where you complete the details. The image can be rotated, zoomed and there is always access to the original file before any manipulations were done to it. If the expense image is really big you can drag the expense form up next to the significant parts of the image so that you don't have to scroll as your attention switches between focusing on the image details and focusing on the entry form.
Split expense
If one expense image contains information about different expenses that need to be split into individual ones you can use the Split expense feature. It creates one (or more) new expenses using the same image. This is useful if you have one receipt from a hotel that needs to be split up on different categories such as Accomodation, Food and Telephone.
Your expenses
The Your expenses page gives you the perfect overview over all expenses that belong to your name. It shows the expenses split up in various groups depending on their status in the system. Incomplete, Unsubmitted, Submitted and Approved. Paid expenses are shown on a separate page. You can manipulate what fields you wan to display in the tables if for example you don't need the added noise of knowing the description or the expense vendor. All of these settings are remembered persistently for your login account but do not affect any of the data they show.
Submission of expenses
Since every employee has the legal requirement to declare clearly that the expenses they submit for approval are correct, the submission process requires one final check followed by an active action. Submitting an expense means that the user can not change or delete it until it has either been approved or rejected by the approver assigned to the user at hand.
Export to Excel or OpenOffice
All tables of expenses either in Your expenses or
in Complete report have the option to export to Excel.
This creates a downloadable .xls file that you can open in Microsoft Excel
or OpenOffice Calc. The file is native Excel which means that the exact numbers are
preserved and with only a formatting set upon it. Every row in the spreadsheet
corresponds to an expense on the system and for every row there's a unique URL that
points directly to viewing the image on the web which doesn't even require you to be logged in.
This makes it possible to hand over your Excel file to someone else within your company
(e.g. the book keeper) with the option still to view the receipt images without needing
to know your username and password.
Export to ZIP file
As an alternative to exporting to Excel with links within the spreadsheet you can
export a table of expenses as a .zip file which includes a generated Excel
spreadsheet file and all the images or documents of the exported expenses. This feature
makes it easy to archive your own records including all the original images. The
spreadsheet inside the ZIP file has relative links to the images sitting in the same
folder so that you can quickly see the image as you're reading the spreadsheet.
Expense search
If find an old receipt you aren't sure you have processed you can search for it amongst
all of your expenses. The search is clever but doesn't require any particular skills.
Just enter what you know about the expense at hand and the system will search the
appropriate fields. If you really know what you're looking for you can enter the various
search terms separated with a comma like "£, project 123, travel" and the system will
only find those expenses that match all searchterms.
If you search for "£10" the amount match will expenses whose amount is between £9 and £11
but if you search for "£10.0" the search with only match expenses whose amount is
between £9.5 and £10.5.
Company settings
All accounts belong to a company. Only the administrators of a company can change the company settings and many of the changes that you can set here trickle down as being the default settings for all users.
Inviting users
You start the company account by having one first administrator. This administrator will then sign up the other users using the Invite user feature which also allows her to predefine details about the users. The administrator can also chose to promote any other user to become an administrator if they want to.
Intelligent date input
When creating a report you can enter dates that limit the number of
expenses it includes. The date
format is ideally in ISO format like 2012/02/28 or 2012-02-28 but if you enter the date in any other format
that you prefer the system will not complain. Instead it will
intelligently try to figure out what you entered
and rewrite it on-the-fly to an ISO format. For example, if you enter
From: 1 feb, To: dec 2012 it will interpret this as
From: 2012/02/01, To: 2012/12/31