Expense Vendors Focus On Receipts To Ease Reporting Pain

Aiming to alleviate some of the pain of expense reporting, several expense technology providers recently have announced enhanced receipt imaging or new approaches designed to speed preparation, approval and/or auditing.

Startup Abukai launched last year to "automate the data entry into the back-end expense approval systems," said president and CEO Philipp Schloter. Abukai's Android-, BlackBerry- and iPhone-compatible apps allow users to take and upload pictures of receipts. Using optical character recognition, global position locators and algorithms, Abukai auto-fills expense line-item details.

Customers can upload expense data files to existing expense or accounting systems. Abukai uses a standard CSV export format with more than 30 transaction attributes, including date, amount, vendor name, city, state, country, project codes and cost center. Value-added tax data also can be parsed to allow companies to compile and identify receipts that must be submitted for reclaim.

"Even with the most modern" expense reporting applications, "sales team members often spend two hours a week on expenses, and others spend at least one hour a month" on data entry, said Schloter, a technology executive who sold an imaging company to Nokia before starting Abukai. "That all goes away because you can submit it right away and it's a lot more accurate." Even with credit card downloads automatically sent to their Concur expense system, employees at one large customer "spend an hour or two putting the expenses together," he said. "That's where the time gets wasted today."

Abukai "is working with a couple hundred companies, ranging from small to medium-size to a few subsidiaries of Global 500 companies," Schloter said. "In one case, a company uses SAP globally and employees have to manually type everything into the expense module. Instead, imagine employees just taking photos of receipts and that info is pushed automatically into that console."

While some customers are using automated expense reporting systems, "most still use Excel and import data into accounting systems," Schloter added. Abukai charges a set-up fee based on the complexity of the integration with credit card feeds and accounting or enterprise resource planning systems, as well as an employee or seat licensing fee of about $99 a year. To help companies estimate potential savings, Abukai recently added to its site an ROI calculator.

Another startup, Certify, launched in January 2009 as a "personal, small business" expense solution, said founder and president Robert Neveu. By mid-2010, "we decided to move to the enterprise," yet continue to serve individuals with a free product called Certify Wallet. Initially offered for $5 a month, Certify Wallet relaunched this year as a free application to attract "contractors, freelancers and independent sales reps to track expenses and billable time to clients," Neveu added. "They can use Certify Wallet to generate an invoice and send online to their client."

The fee-based enterprise version includes Certify Wallet for each employee to take images of receipts, enter data required by the Internal Revenue Service and/or company travel policy and add each receipt to an expense report. Companies can program data imports and exports. Pricing is based on transaction volume—between $6 per report for companies with 500 monthly reports to $4.25 each for those with more than 2,000. 

"There are systems out there today—plenty of them—where using the system is incredibly painful, extremely frustrating and takes longer than filling out an Excel spreadsheet," Neveu said. "There's where companies have struggled and say, 'We paid for this great system; where's our ROI?' "

Certify doesn't rely on OCR, Neveu said, as the application prompts users to enter a date, expense category and amount. Through partnerships with Travelocity Business and nuTravel, some Certify clients flow booking data into the expense application and "automatically create a draft expense report and match booking, credit card and cash receipts" to a trip, he added.

Concur this month launched a "receipt store" that allows users to send receipt images via email, smartphone or fax and later attach them to line items or a completed expense report. Users can attach multiple receipt images and then parse them to specific reports, according to a company spokesperson. Concur's receipt functionality doesn't rely on optical characteristic recognition technology, so users must key in receipt data. Concur said the new receipt functionality is available at no additional cost to users of all versions of its expense tools. Concur said it processes for clients more than 3 million receipt images each month.

InterplX Expense Management allows users to submit receipts via fax, scan, email and a traditional mail-in service in which the system not only scans the receipts but matches them to submitted reports, according to president and CEO Chuck Buckner.

"We integrated payment, audits and receipt imaging within the application so it's a fully integrated solution," Buckner said of the proprietary technology InterplX began developing in 2004 and launched in 2007. The firm was founded in 1994 as an expense service bureau that relied on other third-party technology. "We couldn't be responsive to our clients or control our own destiny and decided to build our own software solution," Buckner said. InterplX now serves about 110  corporations with about 250 corporate accounts and provides receipt imaging, payment processing and auditing for competitor Infor, he added.

While its technology allows customers to use smartphones to capture and submit receipt images, few actually do so. Buckner said that during his career in expense reporting, which began at Gelco more than 30 years ago, he has heard "plenty of OCR claims that don't work."

As smartphone use grows, Buckner and his firm's competitors expect travelers to increasingly use them to not only capture images of receipts, but access applications to create, submit and approve expenses.

Despite the technological innovations of receipt imaging, more than half of 300 respondents to a 2009 T&E expense management survey said their companies continued to review paper receipts. Conducted by the International Accounts Payable Professionals, International Accounts Receivable Professionals and The Association for Work Process Improvement, and sponsored by InterplX, the survey included responses from companies across various industries with revenues ranging from less than $50 million to more than $10 billion. One-quarter of respondents said their companies had moved to online receipt review, and 20 percent said their companies used a combination of online and paper-based receipts. At the largest companies, those with more than $5 billion in annual revenue, 42 percent of respondents said they use receipt imaging.

Among respondents who said their companies reviewed receipts online, 41 percent indicated the companies scanned receipts and uploaded to an expense system, 28 percent faxed receipts, 25 percent scanned to email and about 6 percent said their companies mailed receipts to a document scanning company to digitize them.

While the IRS requires companies to retain receipts for non-per diem meals, lodging and incidental purchases of more than $75, fewer than 9 percent of survey respondents said their companies set the receipt threshold that high. Sixty-one percent said their companies generally require receipts for all reimbursements, 2 percent require receipts for purchases greater than $50 and 28 percent require receipts for reimbursements greater than $25.