Do you work for a company? Do you work for yourself? Then the one thing you’ll be all to familiar with is the Expenses routine. Claiming for milage, train tickets, meals, etc. is all too painful an experience nowadays! Even worse when you lose one of those tatty old receipts…
Well help is at hand! The Guys over at ExpenseMagic have created a very nifty little application that works in a cunning way.
The one thing I despise is having to dig out all the receipts an enter them in accurately in to my expense system.
ExpenseMagic can do the data entry magically for you:-
- Ease of use – simply take a snap of the receipt and the image is uploaded behind the scenes
- Value – simple cost per receipt, no online subscriptions
- Rewards – you’re rewarded with bonus tokens each time you refer a friend
- Accuracy – no OCR, trained book-keepers read each expense and make a judgement as to VAT
How it works:
Just take a photo of the receipt and either enter the details yourself or let ExpenseMagic’s trained bookkeeping team do it for you. You can even attach diary events from your iPhone’s calendar to your expense so that you and your accounts department will always know what it was for.
If you travel overseas, ExpenseMagic uses your GPS location to select the appropriate currency, and also converts your expense back to your home currency. All your expenses are stored securely in the cloud so they are available anytime.
You can export your expenses in a spreadsheet format easily from your phone or online. To make claiming expenses even more effortless you can set ExpenseMagic’s unique Autoclaim feature to send your expense claim automatically to your employer on your chosen day of the month.
So here’s a reality check.
I took 5 of my receipts from an old claim I made. It took me around 5 minutes to submit each receipt back then (once I’d found them, and excluding taking a picture of them, saving to disk and uploading it which would probably double the time).
With ExpenseMagic I took a picture with the iPhone camera and clicked send. It took less than a minute to snap and send all 5 of these receipts and 4.30pm yesterday. This morning (10am) I had an email notification that my receipts had been processed and the report was ready, how simple was that!
Last night I was able to watch one of my fav TV shows as opposed to being sat in my home office typing on the blooming computer.
NOW READ THIS – you don’t get something for nothing in this world! This is a token based system. £2.99 will buy you 20 tokens, and thereby 20 receipts will be processed for you. Do I see this as a great way of making money from an app – of course, well done ExepenseMagic Team for this cunning idea. Would I pay £2.99 to have 20 receipts processed, probably – after all, I did manage to get back half an hour of my day for £245 worth of expenses! However, you can use the app in offline mode and manually add your expenses like other Expense tracker apps – so you’re getting two for one here
ExpenseMagic is currently available on iPhone, iPad 2 and iPod Touch (4th Gen) as it requires a camera, but they also plan to create versions both for Android and Blackberry handsets.
Sorry but do you put the expense of doing your expenses on your expense form?
I think the time it has taken me to take a picture and send it I can have put that into my spreadsheet. Do expense forms reallyt take that long to do?
In my company we have to use their expense forms. How would this work with expense magic.
Sorry but it sounds very niche!
Cheers
Phill
Hi Phill,
I’m Adam – one of the Co-Founders of ExpenseMagic and I wanted to drop you a quick response regarding your post.
It’s not just a time-saving tool. It’s a more efficient was of handling your expenses. I used to lose
a couple of receipts each week which probably equated to at least £100
each year basically going straight down the drain. It’s not just
losing the receipt either, but actually getting round to claiming it as well. We
commissioned a YouGov survey earlier this year that found 64% of individuals
have been left out of pocket due to making inaccurate expense claims. Almost
half of the people surveyed said they lose receipts and often forget to claim
for some items. ExpenseMagic is a neat solution to this problem.
ExpenseMagic makes capturing an expense easy by:
– giving you two ways to upload your expense: *manually – where you enter the information and numbers yourself
*magically – where all the important information is accurately captured for you
– enabling you to attach any event from your diary to an expense so making it easy to see what it was for
– setting the currency based on your location and automatically
converting foreign currencies according to a live exchange rate data
feed
And ExpenseMagic makes managing and claiming your expenses easier by:
– giving you access to all of your expenses through your handset or online at any time,
with sophisticated filters allowing you to search by date, expense type,
currency, status etc – reports can be exported in CSV file format for easy importation into accountancy software- submitting your claim report automatically each month with the unique Autoclaim feature
Regarding compatibility with an employer’s current processes, we’ve worked with lots of companies to make the ExpenseMagic claim as universally acceptable as possible. The CSV that’s created is the simplest spreadsheet format document which is easily importable into accountancy software. We’re finding more and more companies are wanting a paperless solution for expense management, and are happy to use ExpenseMagic in this area.
Feel free to get in touch for more information on 020 7785 7031 or email heretohelp@expensemagic:disqus.com
All the best,
Adam