I love to travel. Whether it be for work or for pleasure, nothing beats exploring the country or the world. What I don’t like about work travel is keeping up with expenses. It sucks out any fun I may be having and adds on to any frustrations I might be experiencing.
The only way to make expense reports even worse is to try and tackle them on the flight home in coach with a one-year-old behind you screaming and kicking your seat. But a free new iPhone app, Expensify, makes expense reports easier for those who travel with an iPhone.
Read on for the full review:
Expensify is a free app that lets business travelers keep track of their expenses on their iPhones. Your receipts, expenses and reports are also stored on the Expensify.com site so you can access them on your laptop/desktop at work or at home. You can keep track of all your expenses in the app as well.
To start, you open Expensify, tap the “Expenses” tab and enter your expense. From there you can specify details such as the merchant’s name and the category of the expense. The killer feature of this app is the ability to let the user input a receipt directly by using the iPhone’s camera to capture the image of the receipt.
This will help you in essence keep a digital copy of your receipts. It’s no NeatReceipts but it’ll do for the iPhone. There is a catch however; don’t expect that this app will automatically fill in the fields when you take a shot of the receipt. This app is not advanced enough to do this.
Once all your expenses are entered, you can compile them into a report for submission to your boss or person who authorizes your expense reports. Here’s where you may run into a problem with this app: it bills your boss.
The Expensify app is free for the end user, but it bills the person who is approving (and typically, reimbursing) reports. The cost is $5 per submitter, per month, but the first two report submissions are free. So, if three people submit reports to you, the cost is only $5/month (the first two people are free); if it’s four people submitting reports to you, then it’s $10/month, and so on.
Overall, Expensify is a killer app for those who travel with their iPhone almost permanently attached to their palm. Just don’t expect your boss and/or comptroller to be thrilled when they initially receive their email invitation to use this service.
