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New mobile app makes expense reports a bit easier

Anyone who travels a lot for work knows one of the worst parts of business travel is doing your expense report when you get back. From cab fares to client lunches, most companies require their employees to save their receipts for every little transaction made.Those of us, who have spent a significant amount of time on the road for business travel, return home with a jumbled pile of crumpled receipts. Then comes the painful, time consuming task of preparing and submitting your expense report. Piecing the trip back together and putting together the required documentation for your employer often forces you to relive the whole trip in your mind, retracing your steps and the associated expenses.Enter “Expense Reports That Don’t Suck”. That’s the marketing tagline for Expensify, a new mobile app that helps you quickly de-clutter your wallet and get through that mountain of receipts the more procrastination-prone among us often face.Expensify, as the name indicates, is an expense report mobile app for iPhone, Android, Windows Phone and now, BlackBerry and iPad that tries to streamline the process by taking paper out of the equation. Instead of stuffing receipts into a file and hauling them out once a month, this app lets you take a picture of your receipt with your phone, and save it as an expense entry.Its standout feature is its SmartScan technology which scans a receipt, extracts the merchant, amount and date of transaction and then saves it as an expense entry. You can do ten of these a month for free. Once you go over that limit, it’s 20 cents per scan. Or, if you’d rather not pay for the scans, you can type in all the information yourself for free.Expensify also lets you import expenses right from a credit card or bank account and allows you to name, categorise, tag, attach receipts and add comments to expenses. And, anything you’ve picked up and paid for in cash can be tracked simply by punching the figures directly into your phone or tablet.Expense reports can be created instantly, take just minutes to generate and can submitted from with in the app. It also syncs with QuickBooks, has infinite storage and allows you to send PDF reports to anyone with an e-mail address.The app is free to use as an individual (unless you go over the ten scan a month limit) and five dollars a month per user if you register as a company that needs to approve expense reports. Keep in mind that if your company uses another system for expense reports, you can still use Expensify. At the very least, it will allow you get organised after every trip making entry into your company’s system fairly quick and easy. And, the app provides good back up if you’re prone to losing receipts along the way.