Abukai Expenses

Abukai Expenses is a knock-your-socks off mobile app that reinforces just how mobile device apps can change our lives in ways other than making us Angry Bird addicts. Abukai, available for Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry, is an excellent app for anyone who has to perform the mundane task of filing business expense reports. Expense reports are filed in three easy steps that require users to type in nary a character: take a picture of your receipt from a smartphone, submit it, and receive your finished expense report. Customization capabilities and integration with back-end financial systems makes this one of the hottest mobile apps and cloud service solutions for any business with employees who must submit expenses. It's not a cheap service, but if you have a lot of expenses to track, it's a great buy.

How to Get It
Interested users can try Abukai for a 30-day free trial. To get started, the app is downloaded from Apple's App Store, Blackberry App World and the Android Market. Pricing starts at $39 a year for an individual; corporate accounts have a one-time charge of $49 plus $99 per seat.? There are also custom plans available which are priced accordingly.

Users must configure settings on the app, such as which email addresses to send or forward expense reports to, and the currency in question?great because if you travel internationally, as expenses are automatically adjusted to your home currency.

Testing
The app opens to a simple interface with two options: "Add Receipt" and "Submit." Clicking on "Add Receipt" initializes your phone's camera. I tested taking pictures of some really wadded up, crinkled, fished-from-the-bottom-of-my-purse receipts with my Droid 2. The app makes suggestions on taking the best pic and, once your pics are snapped, asks if you want to use the picture, retake it or cancel.

Users then click the second button in the mobile UI "Submit." Doing so, causes the message box, "Would you like to get this expense report processed per your company?s rate plan?" to open. Clicking "yes" processes and uploads the receipt.

After a successful upload of about five dilapidated receipts, I received the message, "You should receive your finished expense report by email within the next 24 hours." However, I received my finished expense report in 10 minutes. Yes, this could be because I was doing a review for PCMag and the vendor was watching out for my test report, but I think 24 hours is a reasonable timeframe to get an expense report back, anyway.

The report was sent to my email account (the one I defined in the app settings) as an attachment. Actually, it was sent as several attachments: in a PDF file as well as in .XLS, .CSV, .OFX and .QBO formats. This is forward-thinking on the part of the Abukai developers. At least one of these file formats should be able to get imported into the more common back-end financial and accounting systems that most businesses already have deployed.

I took a look at the Excel formatted expense report. The information from the pictures I took has been sorted by the vendor name on each receipt, pricing information, location and the Abukai service even correctly categorized two of my receipts as groceries. The others which it could not identify a category for (one was a shoe store) had that field blank.

This is okay, because another great user component is the User Portal. This is accessed via Abukai's website?users do need to setup a login account for access. In the portal, you can fine-tune submitted reports. For instance I could add categories that were left blank in my finished report. There is also a nice graphical representation in the form of a pie chart that allows users to see which category the bulk of expenses fall under (you can keep an eye on those entertainment expenses!).??

An Accounts Payable Revolution
I have been looking at a number of impressive Android apps of late and Abukai is right there at the top of the list. I was blown away by the accuracy of the translation of data from a camera phone image into an expense report file. It's Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on steroids.

Abukai Expenses is a great way for employees to quickly submit expense reports and to track mileage, a feature recently introduced. Employers can offer a faster turnaround time for employee reimbursement as well as introduce an automated way to import expense data into the accounting system. The $99 per seat price may be expensive for some companies who may not have a large volume of expense reports to file and may just rely on Excel spreadsheets for that purpose.

However, if you spend lots of time on the road, or your business processes a large volume of expense reports?and especially if manual labor is involved getting those reports processed?then Abukai deserves a look. It's an easy 4.5 star Android app and an obvious Editors Choice for business users.

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