Alyson Behr Esther Schindler The Best Expense Tracking Software of 2017 Is your company's expense tracking still mired in piles of paper receipts? There's a better way. We tested these 10 cloud software apps revolutionizing SMB expense tracking for mobile-enabled workers. Tracking expenses is a necessary tedium in any small to midsize business (SMB). Whether it's keeping a count of day-to-day credits and debits to your operation or making sure every cent of your employee's business trip is accounted for, you need a system that's easy to use for workers and provides complete auditability into expenses for managers and owners.

Both models include supporting software to make scanning and organizing your documents easy, and that also sync with the Neat mobile app for iOS and Android. Neat's angle is to get you hooked with the. Cs Zombie Mod Download Free. NeatDesk Desktop Scanner and Digital Filing System - PC. 861 purchased. We repeatedly came across three receipt scanning software options that work for individuals, families, businesses and organizations. When you scan receipts, software like this will allow you to create digital images of them and use optical character recognition (OCR) to make the text from them editable and searchable in.

If your business finds itself in the red or close to it, there are two likely ways to get back on track, short of its owner winning the lottery. Get a handle on the two largest controllable line items in the budget: salaries and employee-initiated expenses. Cutting salaries or laying off personnel are extreme measures that may not make sense since most SMBs tend to operate with lean business plans. The second option is the far easier choice. The cloud, with its numerous expense tracking, reporting, and management Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products, makes controlling employee-originated business expenses much more attractive. SaaS software is both easy to deploy and easy to use, which means employees are more likely to use it, on top of it generally costing less than traditional on-site hardware/software combo solutions. Why wait until you can't sleep?

Open the expense books and find a solution now. Find the Right Expense Tracking Software Before you can choose SaaS expense tracking software, you have to examine your organization in some detail. Is it based in the United States? Does it do international business? What kinds of expenses are typically initiated by the workforce?

A good place to begin is with a thorough audit of how many employees in your company submit expenses for reimbursement, including travel, business meals, and even office supplies. What are those average expenses? Are they reasonable or do you think individuals are taking advantage? Look beyond the averages; a tool that suits a sales team on the road may not be ideal for the remote employees who visit the home office every quarter. Create an organizational map including the reporting/supervisory structure.

This may sound like overkill but it will come into play if you need a multi-tiered approval feature. Use this information to create loose policies and rules based on location, company averages, and what you deem appropriate.

Next, take a look at the back-end technology your company is using, especially its. Add this to your must-have (BI) data. It's important to minimize employee learning curves so they will be up to speed on the new product with minimal brain drain and collateral costs. A solution that's confusing, difficult to use, or worse, buggy in its integration with your back-end systems will make employees avoid using it, which is exactly what can kill an effective expense tracking solution.

For example, if most of your staff uses Windows phones, you can overlook products that only have mobile apps for iPhone and Android. If your mobile workforce uses iPhones or Android-based smartphones, you're in luck since most SaaS products do have apps for these platforms.

On the finance side, does your bookkeeper and CPA use, or is your business based on more advanced accounting software like enterprise-grade software? Choose a product that you're sure will integrate with the existing software powering your accounting chain; your money-managers will thank you for it.

Expense Tracking System Features Building a great SaaS expense tracking and reporting product isn't easy. It must serve at least two masters: the finance department and the employee. Doing this well means providing not just accurate expense tracking, but also the capability to adhere to company policy and provide the tools for timely employee reimbursement. When it's done correctly, the result of deploying one of these products is increased productivity and collaboration, fewer adversarial relationships, and measurable, significant cost savings. One product requirement for the finance department is that it support company compliance with the (SOX). This law addresses employee expense abuses and imposes draconian penalties on companies that lack effective internal expense controls.

Because of this, the product you choose needs to have comprehensive and customizable policies, rules, and approval designation abilities, and if it has tools to self-audit for SOX, so much the better. Another top-of-mind capability is data storage for at least seven years as required by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Data must be available to create a full audit trail should the request be made. Accounting software integration is another must-have so report data can be automatically folded in to the company's Chart of Accounts; some of these applications also rely on the accounting software to make and track the actual employee reimbursement. While integrating with typical small business accounting tools is fairly straightforward, should your business be using more sophisticated general ledger or enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, like or, the integration process may be more difficult but is no less essential so it's important to plan well at the outset. It's important to both finance and employees submitting expenses that the product's interface be accessible in the user's local language.

It should also be able to slice and dice expenses in currencies the company and employees use. On the mobile side, users need simplicity in their smartphone app, but simplicity that delivers the maximum level of performance in as few keystrokes as possible.

Users should be able to capture images, glean as much specific data from those images as possible, manually input expenses, and create and subsequently submit their expense report for approval. Taking this a step further, the end-to-end process flows more smoothly when products pull in expenses from users' credit cards and facilitate reimbursement into designated bank accounts. Users have different criteria for success. While back-end accounting can run the gamut as far as complexity, anything from the ease of a SaaS-based small business solution like all the way to a multi-month deployment process for the typical implementation, no one wants complexity when it comes to an expense report system. They want simplicity, simply because nobody wants to spend any more time than they absolutely must doing expense reports.

Most of the data entry relies on mobile apps, though each application lets you construct the report using a website and usually email forwarding and credit card integration, too. Employees should be able to capture images, glean as much specific data from those images as possible, manually input expenses, and submit their expense reports for approval. Taking this a step further, the end-to-end process flows more smoothly when products pull in expenses from users' credit cards and facilitate reimbursement into designated bank accounts while filtering key data identified by your accounting professionals to their back-end systems. Expense Tracking Bottom Line. We tested 10 SaaS expense tracking software solutions in this review roundup.

The trials gave us a good view into each product's setup complexity and the issues a regular customer would encounter not just during setup but also during day-to-day use. We looked at key product features, the software's web and mobile interfaces, setup, and ease of use to get an overall impression before zeroing in on end-user points such as camera image capture quality, speed of image analysis, and efficiency of expense report submission and approval.

(OCR) is the electronic conversion of typed, handwritten, or printed text images into machine-encoded text, and it can be a critical component of a successful expense report management software system. The eight products we tested that use OCR—Certify Now, Concur ExpenseIt and Concur Expense, ExpensePath, Xpenditure Small Business, ExpenseBot, Expensify, and Receipt Bank—reduce the amount of required manual data input. Abacus uses geo-location technology suggesting restaurants, etc., to help users. That said, the products that glean the most data from receipt images are Certify Now and Xpenditure Small Business, a key reason why both earned our Editors' Choice award. Overall, Certify Now and Xpenditure Small Business' mobile interfaces are the easiest to use to create expense reports, although Abacus comes is a close second. Abacus also sports a cool, text-like internal communication tool that none of the other participants had, and it provides the most expeditious route for reimbursement.

That said, we appreciated the simplicity of ExpenseBot's mobile app and the feature depth of Receipt Bank, too. From a finance point of view, Xpenditure Small Business and Receipt Bank have the widest choice of back-end accounting software integrations, and they have the best international environment features as well. Abacus is only available for companies doing business in the U.S., and all of the participants maintain data storage for the required seven-year period, if not longer. From the end-user perspective, Certify Now and Xpenditure Small Business tie for Editors' Choice due to their ease of use, and their simple yet sophisticated interfaces available for a wide range of mobile platforms. On the finance side, their policy and rule-setting capabilities are the most comprehensive. Pricing is competitive across all our competitors, with Expensify's $5 per user per month demonstrating that a low price can sometimes still be a true bargain rather than just 'cheap.' Even so, the prices are close enough that other factors may be more important.

Most applications charge based on the number of active users per month, but there are variations, such as ReceiptBank charges based on the number of transactions practiced. Xpenditure Small Business beats out Certify here because of Certify's setup fee. While Concur ExpenseIt and Concur Expense offer cool, seasoned, and full-featured expense management services, they lose ground because it was so difficult to ascertain value without pricing transparency. They may well be a great value for a fast growing SMB, though, so don't overlook them if that's you have an SMB. Any of these products would be good choices depending on your business needs, though the combination of usability, expense functionality, and price gave Certify Now and Expensify the tie for Editors' Choice for medium and large enterprises, while Xpenditure Small Business gets the nod for the little guys.

This round we also included new reviews for Receipt Bank, ExpensePoint, ExpenseBot, and Zoho Expense, all of which are solid options worthy of your consideration. Choose a service that's affordable, easy to use now, and will scale as your business grows. You won't have to revisit the decision down the road. Alyson Behr is a tech writer, editor, and strategic content consultant. With deep roots in testing, industry competitive analysis, and product reviews, Behr has written for numerous IT publications. As a strategic content development expert, Alyson founded and drove the development of Spirent Communication’s sponsored LabRat Magazine, the first publication devoted to the network test and measurement community.

Currently, Behr is focused on product/service reviews and consulting to the IT industry. Follow her on Twitter @alysonbehr.

If you’re on a mission to, receipts are high on the enemy list. They’re little; they’re pesky. They crowd your wallet, and you lose them.

Chances are, though, that part of your business involves maintenance and submission of these little sheets of doom. There will be a time in the near future where receipts cease to exist, but in the meantime, we have some interim technology solutions to help you get through this transition. The options we’ve listed below allow you to scan your receipts using your smart phone camera (and in one case, a portable scanner), organize and categorize your expenses, and keep digital copies in a virtual filing cabinet for your expense reports and personal records. Most importantly, it means you can throw those bad boys in the trash with the peace of mind that you will be fully reimbursed by your accounting department by following their submission guidelines. Here are the best of the best receipt tracking apps. The Best Receipt Tracking Apps 1. Expensify (iOS and Android), a great app that you might remember from our post, takes the manual labor out of filling out expense reports. Using your smartphone camera, you take a picture of your receipt and Expensify automatically identifies and pulls out the charges that you can then associate with a specific expense report.

The app also tracks your mileage and time spent traveling in case you need to add this data to your expense reports as well. The best part: if you happen to lose a receipt (and you know you will), Expensify has an option that allows you to input charges directly from your credit cards for all goods and services less than $75. This will save you time tracking down and manually recording your spending history. Depending on your company’s expense reimbursement policy, this feature could give you the chance to bypass dealing with paper receipts all together.

The downside: Expensify’s receipt scanning feature is not quite perfect at reading receipts, so be sure to check the data to make sure that it’s reporting your transactions accurately. Receiptmate (iOS) brings receipt scanning to a whole new level. Instead of just storing pictures or PDFs of your recepts, Receiptmate saves your receipts with Evernote. With the wave of a finger (literally – you wave your finger over the total price of an item), your spending amount is saved in an Evernote document that you can access anytime from your Evernote account. Receiptmate also lets you view your transactions as a PDF or an Excel document, and you can customize the specific information that’s tracked from each receipt.

The downside: While Receiptmate is a fantastic organizational tool, we’ve heard their support team is a bit slow to respond. Receipts by Wave (Android) is a receipt management tool that merges all spending paths of your life. Using the Receipts by Wave software and app, you can integrate receipts from online orders, email confirmations, and physical paper copies into one organizational tool. Users must confirm purchase details in the app before anything is tracked, which ensures that the software is accurately reading the receipt. Additionally, Receipts by Wave is an organizational tool – you’re asked to categorize each receipt, so you can quickly separate different business expenses.

You can even manage your personal spending through the tool as well. The downside: This app doesn’t work offline, so it’s important to be connected to the internet to upload any document. This might mean saving your receipts for a few hours until you have time to input them all. SmartReceipt (Android) is another great tool for keeping receipts organized. The app, free with ads and $2.99 without, allows you to take pictures of receipts, save them as PDFs, and aggregate the content into professional weekly reports. SmartReceipt uses your activity to help track your spending and manage your budgets, predicting categories of spending based on the time of day. Additionally, if you travel overseas, the SmartReceipt software is able to report on most global currencies.

One unique feature of the SmartReceipt tools is that it lets users input custom fields and export their receipts in CSV format to easily submit for reimbursement. The downside: There’s no cloud backup to store receipt information, so you have to rely heavily on the app and the reports that you email to yourself. This is apparently a feature that the team is actively working on. NeatReceipts (Hardware) We generally support going an app vs. Hardware route for your business needs. However, if you have a more general need for a handy portable document scanner or have concerns about the accuracy of receipt data coming from smartphone camera snapshots, you should check out. NeatReceipt is a portable scanner that lets you quickly input receipts, business cards, and documents on the go.

The small, lightweight scanner is 10.8’’W x 1.6’’D x 1.3’’H, doesn’t need to be charged, and works by uploading your data directly to a computer through a USB cord. Your scanned receipts become digital records, and these documents are searchable files, which is a great benefit if you need to search for specific expenses at a later date. Also, with each NeatReceipt purchase comes 30 free days of Neat Cloud space, letting you access your documents from any web-enabled device. The downside: At $179.95, it’s significantly more expensive than its app alternatives. Also, because of the USB cord, you’ll need to be near a computer when scanning your receipts.

Hope our receipt tracking suggestions have made a tedious part of expense reporting a little easier. If you’ve had any great experience with the solutions above, let us know! If you’re looking for more app recommendations, check out our posts on,, and. Try using our personal expense tracking application at townbreath.com.

The unique feature is the client-side data encryption. That means that your data are encrypted in your browser before sending to the cloud. This guaranteed that your data exist as plain text only in your browser. The decryption password never transmitted to the server and we never ask it. The application allows to organize your expenses into a few custom categories and provides some summary reports for days, months and even years. Your data are stored in the reliable and secure cloud database and available simultaneously from any of your computers or mobile devices, synchronization isn’t required. Try using our personal expense tracking application at townbreath.com.

The unique feature is the client-side data encryption. That means that your data are encrypted in your browser before sending to the cloud. This guaranteed that your data exist as plain text only in your browser. The decryption password never transmitted to the server and we never ask it. The application allows to organize your expenses into a few custom categories and provides some summary reports for days, months and even years.

Your data are stored in the reliable and secure cloud database and available simultaneously from any of your computers or mobile devices, synchronization isn’t required. Awesome list. Shoeboxed is another service you might want to consider. It includes over 7 submission methods for users to send receipts for OCR extraction and human data verification, including in-app and library pictures, emailed receipts, web clipping, prepaid physical envelopes, and Gmail receipt sync that crawls and pulls receipts from your Gmail account. Vendor name, amount, date, payment type and tax category are all automatically extracted and sorted into a searchable, editable archive.

I work there so if you have any questions, shoot me an email at claudia (at) team (dot) shoeboxed (dot) com. Would love to hear your input. Awesome list. Shoeboxed is another service you might want to consider.

It includes over 7 submission methods for users to send receipts for OCR extraction and human data verification, including in-app and library pictures, emailed receipts, web clipping, prepaid physical envelopes, and Gmail receipt sync that crawls and pulls receipts from your Gmail account. Vendor name, amount, date, payment type and tax category are all automatically extracted and sorted into a searchable, editable archive. I work there so if you have any questions, shoot me an email at claudia (at) team (dot) shoeboxed (dot) com. Would love to hear your input. Check out IQBoxy app (www.iqboxy.com) Very Simple and intuitive app with the automatic receipt detection and cropping and OCR in place, no human labor involved. Unlike any other app we never charge for storage and our free plan allows you to upload unlimited number of documents.

Integrates with cloud storage providers: Dropbox, Box, Evernote, OneDrive + Slack Also it allows you to easily transfer data into your accounting software: QuickBooks, Xero, Saasu and Freshbooks. + Tons of other great features you can only imagine.

Check out IQBoxy app (www.iqboxy.com) Very Simple and intuitive app with the automatic receipt detection and cropping and OCR in place, no human labor involved. Dil Hai Ki Manta Nahin Mp3 Songs Free Download. Unlike any other app we never charge for storage and our free plan allows you to upload unlimited number of documents. Integrates with cloud storage providers: Dropbox, Box, Evernote, OneDrive + Slack Also it allows you to easily transfer data into your accounting software: QuickBooks, Xero, Saasu and Freshbooks.

+ Tons of other great features you can only imagine.