Zapping expense headaches

Bill Graziano doesn’t have time for the paperwork. A Kansas City Web development and data warehousing consultant, he often gets overwhelmed by the receipts, bills and invoice he collects while traveling.

“The last thing I want to do when I get back from a trip is fill out an expense report,” he says.

No worries. Thanks to a new site called TimeBills.com he manages to complete his reports while he’s still on the road and gets reimbursed almost as soon as he returns to the office. “Before, we’d type everything in an Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, print it out, and then submit the expense. It was a pain,” Graziano remembers. “TimeBills.com has smoothed the paper flow and helped us get our checks faster.”

Doing post-trip paperwork is one of the most tedious tasks known the humankind – whether you’re back from vacation, tracking your costs from a PC running Quicken or a corporate traveler sorting through the receipts for the accounting department on a pencil and calculator.

But today there are more options than ever to help you establish order amid the bureaucratic chaos. TimeBills.com is the first of what is certain to be a wave of server-based expensing applications (where the actual program is on another machine.)

And there’s already a number of robust client-based applications (those are the kind that run on your computer.) One of the leading PC-based expensing solutions is Quicken ExpensAble a $50 extension of Quicken’s popular QuickBooks accounting program. Available on Windows and for the CE operating system, the software streamlines the reporting process as none of its other rivals (and really, its only true rival is Excel) can.

In a previous column, I talked with Bob Anthonyson, who swears by ExpensAble. “I’m saving a lot of time,” he told me, while also praising the program’s ease of use and flexibility. Up until late last year, I agreed that his plug-in was the cat’s meow. It was small, stable and did everything you could ask it to. If you weren’t employed by a Fortune 500 company that could afford an enterprise-wide solution (translation: too expensive for an end-user to dream about) like the kind offered by the likes of Extensity you were well-advised to buy a copy of ExpensAble.

But things change. Last month, TimeBills.com rolled out what I consider the next significant step in expense reporting technology for individual and small-business users. The Web interface lets you track your expenses from the road by allowing you to begin the expense submitting process before you finish the trip. By the time you get back to the office, the idea is to have a check cut for you by the accounting department.

A pipe dream? Jeff Hunt, the company’s vice president of marketing, thinks not. “Most people still collect their receipts, get an expense form, do a bunch of math, fill out the forms, and send it out to the accounting department in an interoffice memo,” he says. “It’s a waste of time. We thought there was an opportunity to automate it.”

One recent survey pegged the cost of a single expense form, in terms of employee time, at $76 a pop. Automation could reduce those costs by 90 percent, TimeBills.com estimates. Market research conducted by the company also suggested that its target customers – businesses with less than 100 employees – spend $52 billion a year on information technology (some of it, presumably for expense reporting systems.)

In fact, their internal studies said as much: Roughly 80 percent of those polled said they’d be willing to pay for a server-based application that automates expense reporting.

Paul Paez, an Interactive marketing consultant for Narrative Group in Campbell, Calif., tested the expensing functions on TimeBills.com and generally liked the idea. He found the pricing to be attractive – unlike enterprise-wide systems that cost tens of thousands of dollars and take months to install, he set up his account in minutes, and the first five users in the company were free, with a $3.95 charge for each additional employee per month. (For a 500-employee company, that’s $23,700 a year, which isn’t a negligible sum.)

“I think it’s fair to say that I saved a few hours a week by using the system,” he says. “I was very impressed by how easy it was to use and how it tracked everything for me.”

Not so noteworthy was the fact that he had to log on to use it. Often, Paez worked from a sluggish dial-up account, which made some procedures impractical. “I’d really like to see a thin-client of this, so that I don’t have to go online all the time. I heard a rumor they’re working on one,” he adds. Thin-client, for those of you who aren’t enamored of technology (can’t blame you) is geek-talk for a program that relies on most of the function of the system being in the server. Put differently, it enables some of the functions of a client-side program without having to be connected to the central computer, or server.

I’m psyched by the progress represented in TimeBills.com and am hopeful we’ll see more like it in the coming months. But this is by no means a reason to jettison your copies of ExpensAble or Excel just yet. This is new technology, for starters. (So new, in fact, that I couldn’t even properly evaluate it before filing this report.)

I’d hesitate to jump on this techno-bandwagon if for no other reason that that money is involved – real money. Lose an expense form and you could be in serious trouble. One TimeBills.com user made it a point to keep paper backup copies of all his forms “just in case something happens.”

But maybe – just maybe – we’ve seen a glimpse of the future of expense reporting. I, for one, am cautiously optimistic that these systems will blossom into the truly cool apps they aspire to be.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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