Have you got an expense account? That means keeping receipts, and turning them in once a month to someone who’d like you to be a little more organized.
When I was a radio Account Executive, my company’s business department required us to tape our receipts to an 8-1/2 x 11 sheet of paper and turn them in with a special form at the end of the month. It was a cumbersome process, and I left money on the table plenty of times by losing receipts. I am convinced that my company knew this, and saved millions of dollars a year on receipts that were never turned in.
For a salesperson, there are few worse feelings than finding a significant October receipt in January.
It’s a whole lot easier these days. As Brett Nuckles, the Tech Editor of Business News Daily put it not long ago,
That’s where your smartphone comes in. The right apps make it easy to manage your expenses on the go by taking advantage of your phone’s features, including the camera and GPS sensor.
The article lists seven expense-tracking apps for Android and iPhone. I’ve been using Expensify for about a year with very good results. As soon as I pay the check in a restaurant, I open the Expensify app on my phone and take a picture of the receipt. Expensify lets you file the receipts in virtual folders (when I wrote this post in Upstate New York, all my receipts were going into a folder named “Utica 2”).
Expensify organizes all of the photocopies into an expense report, and does all the math for you. It’s a simple process to download the whole report into a pdf and email it to Accounting.
The app is free, and there are both free and paid versions of the service. Bells and whistles in the paid version include integration into things like Quickbooks.
Question: Have you got a tech tool that saves you time, money or hassle? Tell us about it! You can leave a comment by clicking here.
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