

Abacus (YC W14) Wants to Make Expense Reports Obsolete - tgoldberg
http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/18/abacus/

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crazygringo
I agree with the other commenter that real-time daily approval doesn't seem to
be a big selling point (I'm not sure it's even worth mentioning in marketing,
because it might actually elicit negative reactions).

But the idea that the employee gets the money immediately/overnight upon
approval at the end of the trip, or maybe weekly (for long trips), instead of
waiting weeks for a paper check, is huge. As is offloading a lot of the
accounting 'grunt work' of it to another company. And snapping photos of
receipts with location and time data and categories directly attached, and not
having to worry about where they're stored (it's all in the app and on
servers) is a huge convenience too.

Sounds like an exciting idea.

~~~
Domenic_S
We use Concur at work and it's pretty painless. I scan most of my receipts
with the app, usually in one big batch at the airport while I'm waiting
around, do cleanup the next day (taxi/uber fare or parking receipts from the
airport or whatever), and the reimbursement is included on my 2nd next
paycheck at latest, which is direct-deposited anyway.

Maybe the incumbents are good for the enterprise and Abacus is for
small/medium business?

~~~
oq
With Abacus, you'd never have to worry about scanning receipts at the airport
and "cleaning up" the next day to fit all your expenses into an arbitrary
report because it was so quick and easy to do in real time, that not only did
you submit it when it happened and throw away the receipt, but the money was
in your bank account before you even got home from your business trip.

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eykanal
So, I'm a manager, and the _last_ thing I want is to have fifteen different
notifications coming to me in real-time asking me to approve one of my team
member's gas receipt. I'd much rather get the batch after the trip. Not sure
how this would be an improvement on the manager end.

~~~
notahacker
Plus if you're _really_ keen to approve expense receipts in real time then the
Oracle/Blackberry combo works fine.

Funnily enough the _least_ painful expense report I've ever had to send simply
involved filling in a spreadsheet, which lacked the abundance of compulsory
fields that software designed for proper expense auditing seems to have.

The automated bank account monitoring sounds like the biggest potential
timesaver, but it also sounds like something I really don't want to grant to
my employer.

~~~
tedpower
Yea — we're trying to avoid the bajillion separate fields you have to enter,
typical of Oracle or Concur. We try to do some smart things — for example if
you're at a place (gas station, restaurant, etc.) you can select the place
from our 'nearby' list with one tap, and then we're working on using that
location data to automatically categorize the transaction, put it on a map,
etc.

I hear you on not wanting to grant your employer access to all your card data.
Your employer will only be able to see the transactions that you pass through
to them as business expenses.

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goronbjorn
> The New York-based startup is competing in the same space as expense report
> software such as Concur and Expensify. Abacus founders Omar Qari, Ted Power,
> and Joshua Halickman say their service differentiates by making it easy for
> managers approve expenses in real-time through its app, instead of in
> batches at their desks.

This just isn't true. You _can_ approve expenses through Concur's app:
[https://www.concur.com/en-us/mobile](https://www.concur.com/en-us/mobile)

~~~
oq
You can approve expense 'Reports' through Concur's app, which you likely won't
see a manager do more than once a month because your company has the pleasure
of paying $11 per report.

Abacus is built to submit and approve expenses in real time, and we'd never
charge you for that speed and convenience.

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petenixey
I have half paid attention to this space but can never quite figure out what
everything does.

Xero has an app which scans receipts but as far as I can tell doesn't do
expenses.

Shoeboxed does tonnes of stuff with receipts (including parsing them and
integrating with Xero) but doesn't seem to do expenses (is that right?)

All I want is one app that integrates with Xero, scans a receipt, parses it
and lets me classify it as a business receipt or a personal one (to go on an
expense form). I know that's not what this app does (it's expenses only) but
it feels like it should already be out there - am I missing something?

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mathattack
I hope they're right. I hate expense reports. It would be even better to
autosort the credit card data. "You use the card, and just tell us what's not
a business expense. We'll figure out where it goes."

~~~
ebuchholz
Check out [https://expensebot.com](https://expensebot.com) :D

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zt
I have known the Abacus guys for awhile. Their product is cool, solves a real
problem, and has seen some great traction. It's a classic innovators solution
type product: limit the feature set, have a wonderful product, and sell
slightly down market. I can't wait to see the progress they've made by alumni
demo day -- I think it's going to be amazing.

------
phxrsng
I don't see much of a value add over Concur
([https://www.concur.com/](https://www.concur.com/)).

Using it on my iPhone combined with a corporate Amex account I can import my
credit card transactions and tie them to expenses, snap photos of receipts,
etc. I can easily add receipts as non-Amex expenses and it tracks it in the
report.

At the end of my trip my manager approves the report and I get two
disbursements - one a direct deposit to me for personal expenses and one an
automatic corporate payment to Amex to balance the corporate card.

Last time the roundtrip from trip end to payment was 48 hours.

------
cubix
Our company has been using Nexonia for a few years. Not to say there isn't
room for competition, but I don't see any differentiator.

One feature I would like to see is better integration with my calendar.
Nexonia will figure out my mileage based on the addresses I enter, but it
would be nice if would simply pull this information in from my calendar, and
perhaps take a guess at what meeting I just attended based on my current
location.

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mountainair
I work in an industry in which it's extremely important to justify business
expenses to regulators months or years after the transaction takes place. The
ability to build a complete, real-time narrative around expenses, instead of
jotting a few notes about a receipt two weeks later would be so helpful.

It seems that your focus is exclusively on small businesses. Is that the case?

~~~
oq
That sounds like a great use case for Abacus. We do target small businesses
for the most part, but the only thing holding back a company from signing up
with Abacus is if they want a whole bunch of custom accounting work done,
which we won't do.

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thejteam
So if I read that right, if the company I'm working for wants to use this
system then I have to give Abacus direct access to my bank account. Why
wouldn't it integrate with the company's existing system? I hope that's just a
bad writeup on techcrunch's part. Or I hope nobody I work for ever requires me
to use this.

~~~
tedpower
Your bank account information never touches Abacus's servers.
[http://support.abacus.com/hc/en-us/articles/200792470-Is-
Aba...](http://support.abacus.com/hc/en-us/articles/200792470-Is-Abacus-
secure-)

