
Show HN: Abacus – Killing The Expense Report - tedpower
https://www.abacus.com/
======
bane
I'm intrigued. We use expensify and it's been bar-none the easiest to use
expense reporting system I've ever used. At my old startup we did everything
via a pre-setup excel sheet which was also stupid simple.

This solves one of my major problems, after a week or two on the road, I
invariably lose a receipt or two.

But I wonder if it solves my other problems?

\- expenses that don't have receipts, like unattended exact change toll
booths, or when I use my old MTA card (which still has money on it!) to get
around NYC, so I don't have a receipt for buying or filling up a new card, or
grumpy cab drivers that provide a receipt, etc.

\- driving expenses, this is a big problem with expensify, which is geared to
either use their embedded gps directions to calculate distance (which is
_never_ the route I use so it's always off by quite a few miles), or the honor
system which is usually just a best estimate. The other night I went on google
and actually laid out the exact route I took on a recent drive and found out
that my honor system reported mileage was off by about 2 miles. I'd love to be
able to get in my car and hit "expense driving" and have it track my path and
use that as the submission.

\- separating out expenses on a receipt. My company doesn't reimburse booze,
so a dinner out while travelling, with a beer, means I have to manually remove
the booze charge from my expense and recalculate the taxes etc. Or if I'm out
with one of my friends who works for the government, and I pick up the tab via
credit and he pays me back for his portion in cash (the ethics are pretty
strong on this) how do I deal with this?

I've found that expense reporting systems get complicated for these reasons.

Also, I definitely do not want it connected to my bank account.

~~~
tedpower
Thanks for the feedback —

Receipts aren't required. If you're worried about an IRS audit it's important
to have receipts (images) for transactions over $75, but for anything under
that it's up to the company / employee.

Some of the other stuff (mileage reimbursement, splitting expenses on a
receipt) are good points but are also largely responsible for why some of the
other tools out there are so heavy and complicated. We might try to address
these use cases in the future, but for now we're trying to keep Abacus as
simple as possible. You can use the expense note to add this sort of context.

Curious why you don't want to connect your bank account to get paid back? We
take security very seriously, your bank details are stored with PCI DSS
certified processor and never touch our servers.

~~~
bane
> Receipts aren't required. If you're worried about an IRS audit it's
> important to have receipts (images) for transactions over $75, but for
> anything under that it's up to the company / employee.

Most of my employers like the have at least scanned images of the receipts or
a cropped screenshot of a credit card transaction showing the expense. Beyond
IRS requirements, most places just use them to add a layer of verification
that the expense is warranted and correct (I'm not claiming $15 for lunch when
it cost me $7 or something). Being able to just shoot a photo of it with my
phone might be enough?

> We might try to address these use cases in the future, but for now we're
> trying to keep Abacus as simple as possible. You can use the expense note to
> add this sort of context.

Yeah, all that stuff is definitely what makes expenses a PIA. Glad to see
you're keeping things focused. A "expense this drive" that uses GPS tracking
to calculate mileage would be a cool feature though.

> Curious why you don't want to connect your bank account to get paid back? We
> take security very seriously, your bank details are stored with PCI DSS
> certified processor and never touch our servers.

Definitely not a knock against you guys or your precautions. It's just not a
feature I would use personally.

Maybe I'm a luddite, but autobillpay and other electronic transaction systems
are something I try to avoid where possible in favor of getting a check and
depositing it myself. It's not a decision I've ever come to regret and having
an extra audit trail on my end has come in handy several times over disputes
-- besides, I get a nice walk to the bank out of it.

 _note_ I've already sent your URL out to a few people already! Good luck and
awesome idea!

~~~
tedpower
> Being able to just shoot a photo of it with my phone might be enough?

Yup, adding a photo of the receipt is part of expense creation in Abacus. In
2006 a new law was passed that made a photo of a receipt (like the one stored
in Abacus) the legal equivalent of a paper receipt, so you no longer have to
save the paper copy.

Thanks for the feedback and sharing Abacus!

------
wurzelgogerer
How is this different from expensify? Expensify uses the slogan "Expense
reports that don't suck." You are essentially trying to do the same thing
here. What are your main differentiators and what exactly are you doing better
than these other solutions out there?

~~~
oq
I'm glad you asked. It's really just an entirely different approach. We’re not
building another expense tracker (no offense - some people just need to track
expenses). We believe the core of the problem is not in the tracking of
expenses, but rather the back office workflow. We’re trying to solve a team
collaboration problem.

In terms of quantifiable differences, it’s way faster for employees to submit
and get reimbursed because we've extrapolated away the need to even create an
expense report (submit on the fly), managers can review and approve right from
the mobile and for the accountants, everything is on autopilot (accounting
autosyncs in the background nightly, payouts are tied to approval and go out
nightly, communications go out to employees with payout status immediately,
etc.)

~~~
jcampbell1
This sounds awesome.

I used to have the awful job of auditing executive expense reports at a
fortune 10 company. One major problem is that employees submit expenses, and
managers approve them, but they don't comply with IRS guidelines for
deductibility. For instance, an employee just submits a expense for a $300
dinner, and it is approved by his manager.

One area where you could really stand out from the competition is guiding
people to do the right thing, e.g. list the number of people that attended the
dinner and a few names and titles of the attendees.

~~~
oq
Thanks! Firstly, glad you're no longer having to suffer through that, haha.
It's a great point you bring up - we're trying stay focused on serving
businesses with 5-100 employees where that's less of an issue.

That being said, we have built in something we're pretty excited about which
is commenting, where managers and employees can communicate right from the
phones on specific transactions (kind of like sending a text) to clarify and
approve rather than reject and force the employee to start over.

We're also psyched to start building what my co-founder Ted likes to think of
as 'data snacks', where we surface relevant insights based on the situation,
e.g. you're 80% of the way through your monthly budget, which is really what
we've heard companies at that particular stage value most.

~~~
jcampbell1
It is the small businesses that get screwed the most. Big companies have guys
like me. It is only a problem when the IRS decides to do an audit, and they
determine the 50% rule applies on the last 5 years of M&E. It is a non-issue
for small businesses right up to the point when it becomes a major issue.

For instance, if you have "Dinner, $300", that can be a problem. If you have
"Dinner, $3,000, 10 attendees, incl. Larry Page - CEO Google", the IRS will
have no problem, even though it is a $300/pp dinner.

------
bigdubs
Looks interesting.

There is an inflection point in the size of a company / the type and quantity
of expenses where this starts to make sense.

In order to address the market that doesn't do a lot of expensing, maybe would
be useful to have this be a dashboard of sorts that pulls the CC transactions
from your team and presents them in order to get better categorization.

We definitely have an issue now where it's hard to identify charges from the
laundry list transaction report.

~~~
jhalickman
Great idea, right now we only support manually entered expenses but next up on
our roadmap the ability to link in your credit card to do this exact thing.

~~~
btrautsc
That would be another huge plus for me. Categorizing is a monthly chore of
mine.

~~~
tedpower
Good to hear — we're also working on auto-categorizing expenses (i.e. jetblue
== travel, starbucks == meals, etc.). We're going to map the foursquare
category field to our Abacus categories for local expenses, as well as
building a database of online vendors.

~~~
btrautsc
...I _love_ that.

------
tedpower
Hey we're Omar Josh & Ted, the founders of Abacus — let us know if you have
any questions! Happy to discuss payment processing, ACH, why expense reports
suck, etc.

~~~
thomson
Thanks for making this! We've been on Abacus and it's been a really slick and
really easy experience. Highly recommended.

------
jessaustin
I _really_ like the pricing model. I wouldn't hesitate to put in anyone who
might even plausibly have to expense something, because if they don't then
they're free. It feels good not to have to worry about this.

~~~
tedpower
Thanks! Yea it was important to us that our pricing be 'pay only for what you
use' because there's greater utility when companies add everybody on their
team.

------
codegeek
Looks good specially the part "payouts are tied to approval and go out
nightly". So I am assuming that once it is approved, it auto pays ? If that is
the case, how would/did you deal with the bureaucracy of Accounts Payable at
companies ? Departments such as Accounts Payable exist to ensure that they
have the power to send you paper checks (yes even in 2014) and are not willing
to budge from that specially for larger amounts.

~~~
oq
Thanks! Yup - we batch up all approved expenses nightly and do 1 aggregated
debit out of the company's bank account to kick off the payout. You know, we
were also initially expecting to face more resistance, but it turns out
finance departments actually really did mean well, but the tools (or lack
thereof) that they had didn't allow for them to efficiently do a nightly
payout. When you're doing things manually, it's more efficient to do things
once every 2 weeks or once a month. By putting all of that on autopilot, we
actually found the finance departments jumped on it because it's less work for
them and the employees are not only happier, but also incented to submit in
real time, meaning finance departments finally get real time visibility into
expenses rather than having employees shoebox for a month!

------
darklajid
So, I'm currently (for roundabout 3 to 4 weeks) unable to submit my expense
report. The reason? The regulation/laws changed in 2014 and the software my
employer is using is not only notoriously annoying, unstable and crappier than
anything you would get if you'd hit a random freshmeat/tucows link, it's also
'not yet compliant' and is now down for the time mentioned above (it's
operating by mounting a cifs/smb share, launching a windows application from
there and 'submitting' files to that filesystem again. If it doesn't crash and
burn).

The company in question is 'eagerly trying to fix the problems' as a mail to
all German employees stated a couple of hours earlier today.

I would love to move to a better solution.

Unfortunately it seems the service here, as so often the case, is US only - or
US centric. Are there any comparable services that I could submit to my
superiors with a smile, while I point at the rotten mess that is our current
system? Fellow Europeans, how are you doing your expenses?

~~~
tedpower
Unfortunately Abacus is US-only for now, because the ACH network we use for
payments is US only, and there's a lot of variation in payments country to
country.

Sorry to hear about the trouble you're having with your current solution!

------
btrautsc
As the poor soul who covers finances at our startup I positively love Abacus -
and I've craved a solution like this for years... expense reports, receipts,
etc are a never ending stream of wasted time.

We used Abacus last week for a few travel expenses - it worked flawlessly.
What took time and organizational hassle was now done in about 15 seconds.

------
protomyth
I'm curious about: [https://www.abacus.com/tos](https://www.abacus.com/tos)

"BY REGISTERING FOR AND/OR USING THE SERVICES IN ANY MANNER, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO VISITING OR BROWSING THE SITE, YOU AGREE TO THESE TERMS OF SERVICE
AND ALL OTHER OPERATING RULES, POLICIES AND PROCEDURES THAT MAY BE PUBLISHED
FROM TIME TO TIME ON THE SITE BY US, EACH OF WHICH IS INCORPORATED BY
REFERENCE AND EACH OF WHICH MAY BE UPDATED FROM TIME TO TIME WITHOUT NOTICE TO
YOU."

"VISITING OR BROWSING THE SITE"? Is this typical and is it actually
enforceable?

~~~
jhalickman
protomyth we totally hear you on this, it sounds very lawery but it is
standard language used in most Terms of Service. If you look around the
internet you will see similar sentences on most web services.

~~~
robhu
Doing something 'bad' because other people do bad things is not a good
explanation.

Why are /you/ doing it? Why do you think it is justified?

~~~
xerophtye
Well if you think about it, how is it "bad" at all? I am guessing the
"visiting" the site clause means that when you are on the site, don't do
anything against out ToS, (like don't hack in to the database! blah blah). So
it make's sense no? If a site says that the ToS applies only to account
holders (or once you login) does that mean you can legally violate the ToS
pre-login/pre-signup?

Yes yes, this whole scenario sounds kinda dumb, but I honestly don't see
anything inherently wrong with applying the ToS upon visiting the page. Puts
the creator in the legal safe-zone.

------
endeavor
Looks like a great system. Two thoughts I had when I scrolled down to the
bottom of your landing page were "oh there's only 3 of them, and they all look
very casual." Sure you're going for the 5-100 employee segment, but small and
casual aren't attributes I look for when buying accounting products.

I hate to be the conservative one here, but I thought I'd share my initial
reaction. Might want to save those photos for the company profile page?

~~~
oq
There may only be 3 of us right now, but we're proud of what 3 guys in a
suburban townhouse in Mountain View can build when they work their asses off
all day everyday to build a product for customers that want to buy from people
that are allowed to smile on their splash page.

------
JamesAdir
Great site, looks great and seems slick and fast. Can you tell a bit about the
languages/frameworks/tools you've used?

~~~
jhalickman
Thanks so much, our backend is written in Node.js and uses Experess as our web
application. Our web client is written using angualrjs.

Our iOS and Android apps are fully native and built using objective-c and
java.

------
seancoleman
The expense reporting software industry direly needs innovation. My company's
software requires Internet Explorer to upload receipt images and returns a
standard ASP.net 500 error when Chrome is used. Why? I have no idea, because
simply changing the user-agent in Chrome to IE makes the software work. I can
only imagine the code behind this...

~~~
res0nat0r
My company uses Concur and it works pretty well. They have an iPhone app I can
take pics of my receipts with and auto upload them and attach them to expense
reports. It is pretty easy and works fine here with Chrome on OSX.

------
trey_swann
Submitting expenses as they happen is great. I have literally been chased
around the office by finance because of long over due expense reports.

What does your early customer look like? What size organization?

How will you get big companies with large sales teams to adopt Abacus?

Did I read in the comments that you can link to my corporate card charges?
That would be ideal.

~~~
tedpower
Thanks Trey!

Most of our early customers are ~5-100 employee companies. Right now most of
our customers are other startups because that's who we know, but we're excited
to expand to other organizations.

We're gradually adding features for larger organizations — we just introduced
a 'groups' feature for splitting organizations into teams, and we're building
out our bookkeeping sync (Quickbooks, Xero).

We're also working on the ability to pull in your card charges. For personal
cards you'll be able to promote an expense as 'reimbursable'. For corporate
cards all expenses will get automatically pulled in as 'non reimbursable'
(because the company already pays the card bill).

~~~
trey_swann
This is great! Thank you. I'm a big fan.

Can't wait for the CC feature. Awesome!

------
rotten
Pretty cool. I hate doing expense reports.

Now if you could just get rid of the traditional timesheet too, it would be
the perfect app! (I hate doing timesheets every week too. Over the years I've
used more than a dozen different official timesheet-timetracking tools at
various companies and all of them sucked.)

------
nicoles
I've been using Abacus for the last ~2 months, and it's been amazing. Thank
you guys so much for making it! I'm so happy to not have to deal with
expensify (or worse) anymore. I'll be bringing it to wherever I work with in
the future.

------
szermer
Really well done... congrats.

I'd be curious about doing an A/B test on the CTA at the bottom of the page.
That thin grey box around the sign up doesn't really stand out. Try some color
to make it pop. Optimizly makes that super easy to prototype.

------
eterm
Your "Features" and "Pricing" links don't work for me. (FF 27)

~~~
tedpower
Oh shoot we just pushed this new splash page last night, might be a firefox
thing, will look into it. (all those links do is target the page down)

~~~
tedpower
Just pushed a fix should work now if you refresh

------
mercurialshark
The guys at Abacus are solid. I have full confidence in their scalability, as
their core product feature - the ability to get reimbursed directly - is
smooth and the customer support has been particularly awesome. Keep crushing
it.

------
gmartire
I think the best way to sum up Abacus is, "Expensify, but way easier to use."
The UX is only what you need and nothing else. It's goof proof and just works,
that I feel is the biggest value.

------
brianballan
I use Abacus and dig it. Super quick way to submit expense reports and
actually get the money transfer happening in one step. Makes managing a small
business that much easier.

------
grej
As a guy who has filed and approved hundreds of expense reports over the
years, BRAVO! This looks very interesting and is definitely something I'll
check out.

------
randall
I've been using it for the last few weeks and absolutely love it. Even for
small teams, it's a pretty cool way to reconcile all expenses.

------
ismaelc
Interesting! Is this similar to Concur?

~~~
tedpower
We're similar to Concur, but simpler! We don't have 'expense reports' — each
expense is submitted on its own, and we bake reimbursements right in — you get
paid out right to your bank account as soon as your expense is approved.
Concur is targeted at 5,000 employee+ companies, our sweet spot is 5-100
employee companies.

~~~
mithund
Just FYI, Concur has a SMB offering. [https://www.concur.com/en-us/pricing-
editions?icid=en_us_h-t...](https://www.concur.com/en-us/pricing-
editions?icid=en_us_h-topnav_pricingeds-products)

And at $8/month you get Travel & Expense functionality including TripIt pro
with basic reporting included.

~~~
tedpower
We think we're quite a bit easier to use for both managers and employees (not
to mention cheaper)

------
mahmoudimus
Congratulations to the Abacus team :) This is definitely needed!

------
LukeHoersten
How did you get the domain abacus.com? Awesome brand name!

~~~
oq
Thanks! Haha, yah... that's a fun story. So, this really big bank bought a
wealth management company back in 2005 named Abacus, but post-acquisition had
the domain redirect to their corporate domain. Presumably, they'd invested a
lot in their brand already :)

So, we LinkedIn stalked a junior IT guy, worked our way up to an IT manager,
who then passed us off to someone in legal that after 4 months of continuous
follow-up agreed to sell it to us.

~~~
LukeHoersten
Nice work!

------
scotth
Slick animation on the scroll.

