#FiveHours:
The Itemize Expense App Story
PO Box 3510 New York, New York 10163
(212) 206-0880
Imagine what you could do with an extra five hours a week. The positive
difference you could make in your business, or in the lives of others. More time with family. Time networking with colleagues and building business. Volunteering at the local pet shelter. Imagine what you could with that extra time. Precious, extra time.
What if, as a small business owner, you could have those extra five hours per week (that’s 250+ hours/year). What if you could give each and every one of your employees five hours as well. Imagine, 10, 50 a 100 employees each with an extra five hours each what you could accomplish. Don’t imagine.
Itemize. With the Itemize Expense App, our clients can better control how they invest their time because the app virtually eliminates the tedious and time consuming work of managing receipts and expenses – which our research shows a savings on average of five hours a week. In one simple motion, personnel can simply and easily snap a receipt then our proprietary platform with process, store, track and analyze the data automatically. No more hunting for expenses. No more lost receipts. No more manually entering into your accounting software. No more human error and the app virtually eliminates any possibility of fraud. One motion and the job is done, with precise accuracy. Every employee works off of the same expense platform, and what would have taken your accounts payable team hours of tedious manual entry is done in moments with the click of a mouse. Even better, our clients are able to set up the Itemize Expense App in just moments. It’s easy to use, intuitive platform makes it a breeze for even the most technology averse employee (or boss).
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The Itemize Expense App Highlights • Most Automated, Requiring Users To Do The Least • Seamlessly Links and Fully Integrates to Your Small Business MasterCard • Automatic Data In, Automatic Data Out • Budget Friendly, No Long Term Commitment • Simple To Set Up, Satisfying To Use • Ongoing Actual Human Customer Support • Unsurpassed Accuracy
Itemize Corp
Our Itemize Expense App is a Valuable Tool That Positively Impacts Many Roles in Today’s Competitive Small Business. CEO / Business Owner
Busy small business owners are always looking for ways to run their business more efficiently and more profitably. And, the smart ones always look for ways to gain control over tedious business processes – particularly in accounts payable. As a small business owner and leader, it’s important to give your team the best tools to do their job, and the Itemize Expense App saves time and effort – making our business more productive and profitable.
Bookkeeper/Accountant
Working with a company that has the Itemize Expense App solution is just so much simpler. When it’s time for a quarterly review and annual paper dump, it’s just a breeze. No piles of paper. No endless amounts of disparate receipts. One solution for the entire company, meaning consistency of reporting. No human error that takes laborious reconciliation – it’s faster for the accountant, which means less expense for the small business.
CFO/Controller
Without the right software, accounts payable is in the dark ages of business processes. And, until the Itemize Expense App was introduced, expense reporting, reimbursement and management was a tedious, cumbersome, manual process wrought with human error best and fraud at worst. Not only did manually entering expenses take forever, it was a drain on business because there’s no return on the time investment. Itemize Expense App simplifies the entire accounts payable process and makes the entire operation more efficient from tracking, timely reimbursement, and analyzing important business data.
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Administrative Assistant / Executive Assistant
In the past, small business employees would give admins and accounts payable disparate piles of receipts on paper or electronically (if they even did that) that these staffers then would have to manually key in each one. The process is tedious, labor intensive, slow and often inaccurate – simply because of keystroke errors. With the Itemize Expense App, it’s scanned and it’s done and administrative staff can move on to other, more important tasks that actually help make money for the business. Staff is reimbursed faster, everyone is working from the same system, and this makes for a more satisfying work environment.
Accounts Payable
The job of accounts payable is to manage cash flow and properly process invoices. But, when the invoices are a pile of papers or digital receipts coming from all directions that then have to be manually entered, it is a business process nightmare. It takes forever, gives no overall visibility and can lead to late reimbursements or worse, lost expenses. Now, it’s as simple as gather, scan, view, and done. And best of all, it ties in seamlessly to the accounting software most small businesses already have.
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Expense management solutions are the most commonly adopted software types for small business, with 42 percent of companies using expense management solutions, so if your small business doesn’t use it, you’re already falling behind in the competitive landscape. Unfortunately, many companies still resist expense reporting automation, and these organizations experience higher costs, more frequent reporting errors, and lower employee morale than companies with this solution.
Research attributes this adoption trend in large part to the low-value nature of manual expense reporting tasks, and how quickly this process can increase in cost and time as a company grows with increasing expense reports from larger and larger staffer. Expense management Software as a Service (SaaS) provides straightforward solutions to meet these goals and drive down costs, thus delivering a greater ROI. But, while research shows that many companies have adopted an expense management tool, over one-half of AP departments still collect receipts using traditional and inefficient methods. Employees in these companies either send paper receipts or spreadsheet-based reports, or use an expense reporting tool built into their ERP. These methods are costly both in time and money, as they place most of the burden on the employee and require careful attention to ensure accuracy, wasting time on low-value tasks. Furthermore, these methods tend to lead to errors in reporting and a greater risk of non-compliant or fraudulent employee spend. The lack of visibility into spend under a manual expense process is also more of a liability in terms of lost savings and lack of compliance with company expense policies. Another strategy organizations use to enhance current expense processes is to facilitate better training for their employees. If processes are not streamlined or controlled, many employees may not know the proper protocol to report expenses, especially when these expenses might have to be
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assigned to specific projects, labeled in special ways, or separated by certain criteria. Because of this, accounting teams may be spending more time and resources handling report exceptions or expenses that fall outside of company policy. Educating employees, or making the expense report submission process simpler, helps companies avoid these time-consuming issues. Research has shown that expense reporting approval workflow is considered the most valuable feature by most organizations. This aspect of expense management automation saves time by speeding up approvals from managers and reimbursements to employees. Configurable routing and customizable policy triggers ensure that reports are properly routed with little manual intervention, and automatic escalation settings facilitate the approval of requests in a timely manner. Mobile approvals provide on-the-go managers with a way to manage expense approvals via smartphones, tablets, or any device with email connectivity. Administrative features speed up and control the process with support for bulk actions, comment fields, and central administration and reconciliation of company card transactions. Improved approval workflow processes result in shorter processing times for reimbursements, thus increasing employee satisfaction and productivity. They also allow employees to track the progress of their payment through every step of the submission, approval, and reimbursement cycle.
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Some Key Features Anywhere Access
The interface and all reporting is browser and device independent, allowing anytime, anywhere access from any device or Internet browser. Now more than ever in this era of “BYOD,” it’s important for enterprise-wide data to be available on a range of devices via the cloud.
Seamless Integration
The system integrates with any HR, Accounts Payable, and even proprietary systems. Reports easily track and manage fully integrated data. Additionally, users are able to quickly export data displayed on the page into a spreadsheet or other format.
Real-Time Insight
Expense metrics are easily available to the entire enterprise — in real time — so companies can see current and historical trends, and have a better chance to take action about decisions for a more competitive business process. Companies can make informed decisions from real time reports such as analysis of usage patterns, spend trending, and inventory by location.
Ease of Navigation
Our interface offers friendly, simply and consistent navigation, and intuitive icons for ease of moving about the application.
Flexibility
Reports and charts are easily customized for ease of use. Our flexible system provides access to a user’s most commonly used graphs— displaying up to the minute information within a click or two. In addition, searching for relevant data, reports and charts is simple and straightforward.
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The Itemize Expense App simplifies the expense reimbursement and reconciliation process by eliminating paper, reducing manual errors, and frees the user from the hassle of storing paper receipts. Users can automate the expense reporting process by simply scanning or snapping a picture, allowing users to capture receipts from smartphone, define limits & spend policies, and adopt existing, company wide expense practices within the software. The solution allows you to gain visibility into employee spend while giving you complete control over the process from point of purchase to reimbursement or reconciliation.
Policy enforcement and compliance
Policy enforcement leads to reduced overall operating costs. Having a system that allows you to monitor and control this spend reduces overspending and curbs paying for out-of-policy expenses.
Reimbursement delays
Employees might struggle to capture, enter, and submit their expense reports in a timely manner. This tends to delay corporate card reconciliation and out of pocket reimbursement. Expense management app helps reduce the pain experienced by employees by automating the capture, entry, and submission process of expense reporting.
Errors
Working with spreadsheets results in user pain, and user error. Entering expenses by hand, approving by hand, and keying into an accounting system by hand is time consuming and wasteful. Manually processing expenses costs your company time and money. Therefore, businesses need best expense software to track expenses and eliminate the manual requirements across the entire process
Poor visibility and reporting
Not having granular insight into company-wide spend practices makes it difficult to understand who is spending more, where and why. CFO’s, controllers and other concerned parties find it difficult to monitor and track expenses in the real-time without an automated expense solution in place. Automated business expense tracker helps by providing a full suite of analytics and reporting modules, allowing you to identify spend trends, curb unnecessary spend, and save money.
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General Industry Research & Background The cloud, with its numerous expense tracking, reporting, and management Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products, makes controlling employee-originated business expenses much more attractive. SaaS software is both easy to deploy and easy to use, which means employees are more likely to use it, on top of it generally costing less than traditional on-site hardware/software combo solutions. Why wait until you can't sleep? Open the expense books and find a solution now. v
The Right Expense Tracking Software
Before you can choose SaaS expense tracking software, you have to examine your organization in some detail. Is it based in the United States? Does it do international business? What kinds of expenses are typically initiated by the workforce? A good place to begin is with a thorough audit of how many employees in your company submit expenses for reimbursement, including travel, business meals, and even office supplies. What are those average expenses? Are they reasonable or do you think individuals are taking advantage? Look beyond the averages; a tool that suits a sales team on the road may not be ideal for the remote employees who visit the home office every quarter. Create an organizational map including the reporting/ supervisory structure. This may sound like overkill but it will come into play if you need a multi-tiered approval feature. Use this information to create loose policies and rules based on location, company averages, and what you deem appropriate. Next, take a look at the back-end technology your company is using, especially its accounting software. Add this to your must-have business intelligence (BI) data. It's important to minimize employee learning curves so they will be up to speed on the new product with minimal brain drain and collateral costs. A solution that's confusing, difficult to use, or worse, buggy in its integration with your back-end systems will make employees avoid using it, which is exactly what can kill an effective expense tracking solution. For example, if most of your staff uses Windows phones, you can overlook products that only have mobile apps for iPhone and Android. If your mobile
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workforce uses iPhones or Android-based smartphones, you're in luck since most SaaS products do have apps for these platforms. On the finance side, does your bookkeeper and CPA use QuickBooks Online Plus, or is your business based on more advanced accounting software like enterprise-grade general ledger accounting software? Choose a product that you're sure will integrate with the existing software powering your accounting chain; your money-managers will thank you for it.
Expense Tracking System Features
Building a great SaaS expense tracking and reporting product isn't easy. It must serve at least two masters: the finance department and the employee. Doing this well means providing not just accurate expense tracking, but also the capability to adhere to company policy and provide the tools for timely employee reimbursement. When it's done correctly, the result of deploying one of these products is increased productivity and collaboration, fewer adversarial relationships, and measurable, significant cost savings. One product requirement for the finance department is that it support company compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). This law addresses employee expense abuses and imposes draconian penalties on companies that lack effective internal expense controls. Because of this, the product you choose needs to have comprehensive and customizable policies, rules, and approval designation abilities, and if it has tools to self-audit for SOX, so much the better.
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Another top-of-mind capability is data storage for at least seven years as required by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Data must be available to create a full audit trail should the request be made. Accounting software integration is another must-have so report data can be automatically folded in to the company's Chart of Accounts; some of these applications also rely on the accounting software to make and track the actual employee reimbursement. While integrating with typical small business accounting tools is fairly straightforward, should your business be using more sophisticated general ledger or enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, the integration process may be more difficult but is no less essential so it's important to plan well at the outset. It's important to both finance and employees submitting expenses that the product's interface be accessible in the user's local language. It should also be able to slice and dice expenses in currencies the company and employees use. On the mobile side, users need simplicity in their smartphone app, but simplicity that delivers the maximum level of performance in as few keystrokes as possible. Users should be able to capture images, glean as much specific data from those images as possible, manually input expenses, and create and subsequently submit their expense report for approval. Taking this a step further, the end-to-end process flows more smoothly when products pull in expenses from users' credit cards and facilitate reimbursement into designated bank accounts. Users have different criteria for success. While back-end accounting can run the gamut as far as complexity, anything from the ease of a SaaS-based small business solution all the way to a multi-month deployment process for the typical ERP implementation, no one wants complexity when it comes to an expense report system. They want simplicity, simply because nobody wants to spend any more time than they absolutely must doing expense reports. Most of the data entry relies on mobile apps, though each application lets you construct the report using a website and usually email forwarding and credit card integration, too.
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Employees should be able to capture images, glean as much specific data from those images as possible, manually input expenses, and submit their expense reports for approval. Taking this a step further, the end-to-end process flows more smoothly when products pull in expenses from users' credit cards and facilitate reimbursement into designated bank accounts while filtering key data identified by your accounting professionals to their back-end systems.
Actual User “My name is Adrina Phipps and I am the small business owner of a pet care business serving the Silicon Valley area for over 25 years. The name of my business is Furry Friends Pet Sitting Services. I have been a long time customer of the Itemize platform. Why I needed Itemize was because I needed a mobile way to track my expenses. Being a small business owner, before Itemize, I had to manually go through my receipts at the end of the year and put them into various categories. It was a timely activity and probably not always that accurate. I had been using other apps to track expense receipts, but nothing really worked until I found Itemize. Itemize captures the image of the receipt and with just a few more specific inputs, you have a perfect record of your expense. Not only can I see my expenses on my mobile device, but I can use the app on my PC. On both the mobile device and PC, I can easily run, AND PRINT, specific reports. The ability to save time for me is key, and staying on top of my daily expenses makes life so easy, especially in prepping for taxes. And the other aspect I completely appreciate is the "live" customer support I receive, should I need it. I pray that they never change that aspect of their business model...that sets them apart from the others, in my opinion.”
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