This is the time of the year many of you inevitably spend a weekend or so sorting the box-full of receipts you had collected throughout the year – you need to re-read them, try to remember details, categorize, sort, in preparation of either preparing your own Tax Return, or handing them over to your accountant.
Or you can just dump them all on to Shoeboxed, a service that scans and categorizes all your receipts, and provides them in the electronic format of your choice. (They do for your bills what ScanCafe does for your photo prints.)
And it gets better: yesterday Ben reported that the popular Web-based invoicing solution, FreshBooks is now integrated with ShoeBoxed. So now you can have your paper expense receipts show up in an invoicing app directly. Voila!
It’s better than fiddling with paper, stuffing envelopes and wait for Snail Mail – but it really that good? I don’t know about you, but I barely ever use cash nowadays – except for the local farmers’ market, and that’s not a reimbursable / deductable expense. So here’s the maddening part: most expense transactions start their life electronically, and we only print them on paper to have an official record – whether it’s for the tax authorities or for Clients to bill out to. Either way, the paper receipts will be converted back to electronic format. I’ll repeat: in most cases we only generate and safeguard paper as a temporary medium between two electronic formats. Isn’t that ridiculous?
We can get most of our expenses, originally paid for by credit card, check, or bank transfer automatically downloaded into Money Management / Accounting software. No paper was required to effect payment, there is a “record of transaction” behind every single credit card charge, so wouldn’t it suffice as proof of expense?
There are significant attempts at paperless expensing in the Enterprise sphere, for example Amex and Concur provide end-to-end systems that take care of the entire process from travel booking through expensing to reimbursement. But the process depends on a number of vendor agreements, e.g. major hotel chains and airlines providing e-receipts that Concur can match up with the Amex record. Should the banks that already provide me with an electronic record of my transactions be the authentic source of all expense information?
Here’s my dream 22nd century (?) very SaaS-y version of expense reporting:
- Payment transactions automatically downloaded into my personal money management software (Quicken, Money, Mint ..etc) – this is already happening.
Next, what will it take to:
- Pull items from Quicken et al into the expense report ( I am already doing this)
- Have the expense system collect the electronic record (link to it) automagically
- Submit it all, again electronically
I suppose there are a number of data format / standards issues, but also non-technical, legal, tax regulatory, privacy issues to overcome here. I don’t claim to be an expert, but am in the lucky situation that we already have the cream of the financial profession, CEO’s of Accounting startups, established firms, Accountants and Lawyers regularly comment here @ CloudAve, thanks to Ben’s Accounting 2.0 series. So here’s the challenge: let’s channel all this chatter into something constructive, and try to define what it will take to get to my 22nd Century Expense Management system.
And does it really have to be 22nd century, or will I see it in my lifetime?
Hi Zoli, I agree — given how quickly the web has evolved in the last few decades, it is astonishing that billing, accounts, expenses etc. are still handled laboriously on paper. Ok, more suppliers are now sending invoices as PDF or plain text by email, but it still requires information to be re-entered in your own system. Having a human in the loop is expensive and error-prone.
I am currently working on OAccounts, an open standard for storing and exchanging financial transaction data between different accounting-related systems. See my blog post on “setting your accounts free” why I think this is a good idea.
OAccounts uses the OASIS UBL open standard for representing invoice and payment data. This powerful standard is gradually getting adopted worldwide — for example, it is already mandatory in Denmark for any suppliers to the public sector to use it. It is well designed by people who understand the nuts and bolts of international commerce, and it really ought to be a format which all applications can understand.
I am planning an open source reference implementation of OAccounts, which should provide the basis for a lot of the automatic linking of data sources which you are hoping for.
I would much welcome any contributions in designing OAccounts, to make sure we get it right and make it suitable for the real world.
Zoli,
I love the line “we only generate and safeguard paper as a temporary medium between two electronic formats”. It’s absolutely true. We all have PCs, software, email and everything necessary to eliminate paper receipts.
It’s worth noting that receipts (typically a record of a cash transaction) are only half the problem though. Invoices (typically a record of a credit transaction) are much more prevalent in a business environment and suffer from the same computer-to-paper-to-computer cycle. There are 24B B-2-B invoices sent in the US every year.
The 1st gen of billFLO enables business receiving PDF invoices to import them into their accounting system without having to re-enter them – eliminating the need for a paper invoice while also archiving a digital copy for tracking. It’s our first step towards killing off the paper invoice.
Keep up the good work on CloudAve, I’m enjoying yours a Ben’s daily insights.
Ian Sweeney
http://www.billflo.com
Have you tried Expensify? It sounds like almost exactly what you describe: import your credit card straight from your banking website (similar to Mint), paperless eReceipts for imported purchases, submit and reimburse entirely online, etc. It’s going to public launch in a couple weeks — sign up for the mailing list here and I’ll add you as a beta tester so you can get a sneak peek!
http://expensify.com
-david (Founder, Expensify)
I need this for Xero. Then I would truly be a cloud business!!
Hello everyone!
There’s a ton going on at http://Expensify.com : new API, closed a $1M round of seed funding, Salesforce application, QuickBooks integration, new iPhone app, and lots more. We’ve been working hard and people are starting to notice! Expensify’s Salesforce integration was recently picked the “audience choice” expense reporting application, AlwaysOn picked us as a “Global 250 innovator and disrupter”, we just demoed our new API at the SF New Tech meetup and we’ve got much more in store. Please check out our latest coverage below:
http://venturebeat.com/2009/08/12/expensify-raises-1m-for-online-expense-reporting/
http://www.examiner.com/x-4003-Techie-to-Trendy-Examiner~y2009m8d13-SF-New-Tech-is-a-fun-factory
Thanks for your help. It’s hard work getting the word out, and I really appreciate the attention you’ve given us. (And if you would be so kind as to tweet or post us somewhere, that’d be rad!) If you have any questions at all, or if you’d like to see a live demo or learn more, please contact me or David Barrett (the CEO) directly at [email protected] (801-860-0540). Thanks!
– Abbas ([email protected])
You should follow us at http://twitter.com/expensify