ExpenseBot

Employees want the expense tracking software process to be so simple that they don't need to read a manual. However, administrators and accountants want fine-tuned control over business policies and approval workflow. For most technologies in that situation, you might say "Never the twain shall meet," but with ExpenseBot (which begins at $9 per month) that may not hold. The expense accounting application does not overwhelm employees with choices, yet it offers accounting staff unique customization options. Only a slightly clinky export process and the lack of a self-serve purchasing process keep it behind our Editors' Choice winners Certify Now and Expensify.

Pricing and Features

An ExpenseBot subscription costs $9 per month per active user, with a minimum of $99 per month. There are undisclosed discounts for a yearly contract or companies with more than 1,000 users. You can't experiment to learn whether ExpenseBot is the right software for you, however, as it has no free version or free trial. Getting started requires an email conversation with the company; it's not self-serve.

Employees won't find any fancy feature gee-gaws, and most of them will be grateful. You enter expense data into ExpenseBot via a web browser, through the mobile app, by forwarding a receipt to a dedicated email ID, or directly via a credit card transaction (using a registered company or personal credit card). Each captures the relevant accounting data, such as vendor name, expense category, and transaction date, before you assign the expense to a report. Expenses can be marked as billable, so you can pass along costs to a client.

As with all these apps, most people turn first to the mobile app to capture receipts. If not at the point of sale, then at the end of each day, while you can still find the crumpled-up paper in your pocket and remember what it was for. The mobile app is fairly simple, with categories for reports, expenses, receipts, and settings. While others (such as Expensify) try to give you all the tools at your fingertips, ExpenseBot doesn't stuff everything into the app.

There's no reason to complain about its receipt scanning capabilities, though. ExpenseBot accurately parsed several receipts, including scribbled-in tips, and remembered previously-used categories and vendor names. The process is undemanding and minimizes decision-making. If you link a personal or corporate credit card, after ExpenseBot scans and transcribes a receipt, it attempts to match the receipt to credit card transactions.

You can submit mileage expenses manually. Or, if you type in the start and end address, ExpenseBot calls upon Google Maps to figure out the actual distance (a feature shared by ExpensePoint). That's certainly handy for a one-way trip, though it would be nicer if you could say, "Now double that mileage calculation, since I met someone downtown and then returned to the office." A better answer may be on the way: By the end of the year, the company says, ExpenseBot will have GPS and calendar integration. Thus, if you have a meeting scheduled, it'll say, "You're going to Client-A 53 miles away; do you want to add it to your report?"

One unusual nicety: Any employee can appoint a delegate, giving that individual the ability to create expenses and reports. If you're lucky enough to have office support staff to manage your expenses, that's a major boon.

Simple Doesn't Mean Simple-Minded

ExpenseBot may apply the "keep it simple stupid" (KISS) principle for employees, but it gives administrators and accountants plenty of customizable power. Approvers can reject a single expense and approve the rest of the report, so that the $5 item you're quibbling about doesn't have to hold up reimbursement for the rest of the $2,500 you spent on a trip to San Francisco. Expenses can be approved by email, so the department manager doesn't have to spend a lot of time on the web client. ExpenseBot checks for possible duplicate expenses, and offers to merge them, too. ("Two visits to Starbucks on the same day for the same amount? Did you drink a lot of coffee, or submit this twice?")

ExpenseBot comes with basic accounting categories pre-configured, and naturally you can add more. Each expense category can be tied to a general ledger or account code, require date ranges or attendee lists, and support custom fields (such as "Store number"). You can organize things logically, too, so that airfare and airfare baggage fees are tracked related-but-separately, with their own rules and policies.

Policy management lets you control how much a user spends in a given category, such as a monthly limit of $40 on home Internet costs. You control whether users can submit an expense exceeding the policy (and display a warning to the approver) or prevent the report from being filed with a transgression in place. Customizations extend to reports, not just expenses; for example, a fast food chain may require the store number on each report.

That's just a sample. ExpenseBot supports multiple approvers, department and user profiles (bosses get different treatment), expense aging ("You must submit the report in 30 days" which is just plain mean), and a whole lot of currencies.

Unfortunately, for all its customization power, ExpenseBot is weak on integration with third-party accounting systems. Expense report management is a discrete process, but its results need to be recorded in other systems, usually at least an accounting system and sometimes more. With ExpenseBot, however, you can only integrate with Intuit QuickBooks when it's time to actually reimburse the employee. More unfortunate, when compared to some of the other products I reviewed, the company admits that its QuickBooks integration "requires the use of the Intuit web connector and a little finesse to set up." The only other option is to export data into the CSV format and then open it with another application, like Microsoft Excel.

Contrast that with ExpenseBot's competitors, such as Expensify's integration with not just QuickBooks but also Xero, NetSuite, and Intacct among others. With all these capabilities, you get a lot of handholding from the company. In fact, you can't avoid it; ExpenseBot works with every customer personally to set things up.

At the time of this writing, ExpenseBot is a combination of "Oh how cool" and "Why doesn't it do that?" It's a good choice for anyone who wants to simply things for users, without minimizing administrative controls. But its lack of a self-serve interface, support for only QuickBooks integration, and price that doesn't seem as friendly as it should be, all combine to keep it just a notch below our Editors' Choice-winning tools Certify Now and Expensify. However, if the negatives don't immediately chase you off, I urge you to consider ExpenseBot for your business. Its balance of simplicity and power is genuinely nice.