If managing expense reports is your least favorite part of flying on behalf of your business, you’re in good company. Having to keep track of all your purchases and making sure that they are eligible expenses can be time-consuming. 

To that end, the Expensify – Expense Reports, Receipts, Mileage, Time Entry and Travel app for mobile devices was designed to help weary business travelers save time, reduce paperwork and minimize the hassles that come with expense reporting duties.

All the end user has to do is launch the app and use Expensify to take a picture of a receipt, and then select which expense report the receipt’s image should go into. The app automatically scans the details in the receipt and generates the expense for your records. This is much easier than typing it in manually and then hanging onto the paper record.

More than 2.5 million users from 300,000 companies are currently using Expensify, according to the developer. 

Besides scanning in receipts, you can use Expensify to keep track of your hourly rate and how much time you worked on a particular job or project. You can use your smartphone’s GPS to keep track of the miles you travel. It includes support for worldwide currencies with automatic currency conversion. Companies are able to set up the app with their own expense policy details, implementing Expensify to administrate rules and tags for each user.

One interesting and useful feature lets users import their credit card transaction details, which comes in handy if they lost a receipt before getting a chance to scan it in with the app.

The upgrade made on March 26, 2015 is a user interface change, eliminating the old home screen. Now a large “plus” button that users tap to start creating their new expenses. Also added to the app was SAML support for improved authentication and more precise usage of GPS data.

Expensify is a free app and is available for use on Android devices and Apple’s iOS devices.

The post The Expensify App for Expense Reporting Gets an Upgrade appeared first on Royal Coachman.

• Were your company’s travel expenses highly erratic over the last year? Average out the prior months while leaving out both the highest month and the lowest month. This eliminates some of the less than predictable expenses while still giving you a rough, reasonable average.
• Get quotes on the expenses that you know you will have, such as travel insurance and corporate auto insurance. These expenses can change vastly year-over-year, so prior year estimates aren’t going to help. This is especially true if your company has grown significantly or if any high risk factors have been introduced.
• Look over your books line by line for any improperly coded travel expenses before you complete your projections. A large trip or two placed in the wrong area, such as in promotions, could skew your expenses.
• Don’t forget any large events that you already know that your company is planning. It may be worthwhile to estimate out the expenses for these events in an itemized list.
• If your company has grown substantially in the last year, it’s a good idea to assume that your expenses are going to grow proportional to your income. If your company has doubled income, for instance, it’s very likely that travel expenses may double as well. However, if your company has remained relatively static, your travel expenses may stay the same or even go down.
• Once you have itemized a list of your travel expenses, consider going over the list to look at areas in which you could improve. Projecting your expenses is a good time to prune the budget down.
• Contact the companies that you work most closely with and inquire about whether their rates will be going up in the coming year. This is a fantastic way to head off any last minute surprises.
• Always leave a substantial buffer to ensure that you have enough cash at hand in the event that there is an emergency or an expense adjustment. It’s always best to assume that you will spend more than you actually will.

There’s some good news ahead for companies tightening their travel budgets–travel expenses are unlikely to increase significantly year-over-year due to the lowered gas prices. This makes ground transportation an even more cost-effective method than it was before.

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