To me this seems to double the effort - first you approve every single expense using Abacus, later you go over all the bills and receipts again and try to match them with what you approved earlier. At least to me it seems simpler to just go over the bills and receipts once. And if you want to avoid that your employees have to wait for their money just hand them credit cards - they don't even have to spend their own money, expenses are approved by default - which is hopefully the common case - and just in the uncommon case of unjustified expenses you have to take actions and deduct the amount from the salary or compensate in a different way.
I'm not sure what you mean by the second step 'later you go over all the bills and receipts again and try to match them with what you approved earlier'
With Abacus, the payments are automatic. We also sync directly with your accounting software. We automatically create a bill (with the expense info) and the bill payment (from your companies connected bank, which gets auto-debited) so there's no reconciliation. The two cancel each other out, it's totally on auto-pilot.
Also, with corporate cards, you're still required by the IRS to save receipts for expenses over $75, so there's still a reconciliation process. We're building the ability to import your card expenses straight into Abacus, so you can add the note, receipt etc. all in the same place.
Surely it's more convenient for the manager to 'batch' up expense approvals to a single list that she can tackle once a month? I'm not sure receiving constant notifications - that require attention and imply she's going to action them somewhat immediately - is helping her?
(I say the above somewhat with a snarky/contrarian tone but presumably it is the manager or their boss/executive/CFO who is the decision maker to implement this app, and indeed this change to the accounting process? While I can see the benefit for the individual contributor, I'm not sure how this helps the decision maker)
If managers only want to log in and approve stuff in batch they're still welcome to do that with Abacus. But we've found that people quickly adapt to the faster flow —
What we've found is:
1. Managers like the transparency of knowing how their employees are spending money. Many managers today actually have to nag their team to get their expenses in before they close the books. This more up-to-date information about how money is getting spent can often be helpful to the manager.
2. Approving expenses in Abacus is stupidly easy, and it shows that you love your employees. Companies (especially in tech) compete so hard to make employees happy (snacks, benefits, etc.) and Abacus is one of the easiest ways to make your employees happier. Rather than treating employees 'guilty until proven innocent' and making them wait months to get paid back for their legitimate business expenses, Abacus lets you easily reimburse your employees, which you're going to do anyway. Win win
3. It's actually a time saver. Abacus syncs directly with your bookkeeping software (time-saver) and we automatically categorize expenses, based on the vendor info we pull from foursquare (time-saver). We've also built the conversation directly into Abacus, so you can comment on any expense that needs further clarification, rather then trying to hunt someone down over email about some confusing expense from 2 months ago (time-saver). The net effect is a much tighter, faster feedback loop.
I respect you're doing a PR promo on HN to get lift, I've done it many times myself, not wanting to crap over your play here but...
Managers shouldn't need that degree of transparency - expense policies are common, employees are not babies and should know the rules, and ultimately if an expense isn't justified the company isn't going to pay it anyway/deduct from wage (depending on whether it's personal card claim or corporate card based expenses)
I don't really buy #2, monthly expenses is common and hardly making them 'guilty until innocent'. If you have to sell your company to a potential hire as "having good expense claim policies" then you've got issues.
For #3, I would assume most finance teams would have existing systems in place to do the expense tracking itself (Expensify, some god-awful Oracle thing, etc) and so again, that's hardly a "win" and possibly a duplication. Foursquare characterization based on a checkin doesn't sound great compared to the heuristics that established software like Expensify already have in place.
Look, I wish you the best of luck with the launch but as someone who has been many years of filing and agreeing expense reports I just don't get where the sweetspot of need is this app fills.
Agree that there needs to trust here, we're thinking about adding a setting where you can set auto-approval limits, so that any expense under $x get approved without any approval.
Next time you're compiling an expense report or waiting to get reimbursed, think about how things might be different with something like Abacus ;)
Seems interesting. Definitely would be great to have a solution to this. Does this require management to approve each expense? If so, it seems the next-day reimbursement is a pipe dream. If not, how do you with illegitimate expenses?
Hey Michael, yup this still requires manager approval. Our manager approval is just about the easiest thing imaginable — managers get a push notification when there are new expenses, and they can swipe across the expense to approve them (like Mailbox App). The majority of expenses on Abacus are approved within 24 hours.
Sometimes managers worry that these notifications will get annoying (we worried about that too). What we've found is that managers actually like the transparency of knowing what their team is up to, and it's a great opportunity to send a little love to your employees by getting back to them quickly. It also takes just a few seconds / day. You can turn off the notifications, but most people don't.
