This would definitely alleviate hours of headache for my dad's retail business across each of his locations if it works. For someone who's not technical, but wastes tons of time in spreadsheets himself, how easy would it actually be to dive in and get started and how would that work exactly? He right now takes CSV exports from his POS and then starts trying to set up pivot tables, but it's not pretty.
I used to work at a major bank on the sales team and I can't tell you how instrumental it is to have a transparent tool like this across the organization to help motivate you so you can see where you stand and feel part of something bigger as you're individually speaking to customers. Top performers are highly motivated by this.
Our system at the bank was pretty janky, but the top sellers obviously made it their job to learn inside out. From what I can tell, this is the tool that I wish we'd had, where you not only get the motivation through transparency, but it seems like the performance on the service very closely correlates with the $s that would be going into my pocket.
It would be cool if you guys had some kind of rewards for different tiers of performers.
That sounds like a great use case for Abacus. We do target small businesses for the most part, but the only thing holding back a company from signing up with Abacus is if they want a whole bunch of custom accounting work done, which we won't do.
With Abacus, you'd never have to worry about scanning receipts at the airport and "cleaning up" the next day to fit all your expenses into an arbitrary report because it was so quick and easy to do in real time, that not only did you submit it when it happened and throw away the receipt, but the money was in your bank account before you even got home from your business trip.
It really depends on the expense volume, which is why we let managers set the frequency of notifications - for heavy volume sales organizations, they may prefer to review it as a daily digest, whereas for low volume founders, they expect to see everything real time. Abacus is as real time as you want it to be. We make it faster for employees to submit and managers to review.
You can approve expense 'Reports' through Concur's app, which you likely won't see a manager do more than once a month because your company has the pleasure of paying $11 per report.
Abacus is built to submit and approve expenses in real time, and we'd never charge you for that speed and convenience.
There may only be 3 of us right now, but we're proud of what 3 guys in a suburban townhouse in Mountain View can build when they work their asses off all day everyday to build a product for customers that want to buy from people that are allowed to smile on their splash page.
Thanks! Haha, yah... that's a fun story. So, this really big bank bought a wealth management company back in 2005 named Abacus, but post-acquisition had the domain redirect to their corporate domain. Presumably, they'd invested a lot in their brand already :)
So, we LinkedIn stalked a junior IT guy, worked our way up to an IT manager, who then passed us off to someone in legal that after 4 months of continuous follow-up agreed to sell it to us.
Thanks! Firstly, glad you're no longer having to suffer through that, haha. It's a great point you bring up - we're trying stay focused on serving businesses with 5-100 employees where that's less of an issue.
That being said, we have built in something we're pretty excited about which is commenting, where managers and employees can communicate right from the phones on specific transactions (kind of like sending a text) to clarify and approve rather than reject and force the employee to start over.
We're also psyched to start building what my co-founder Ted likes to think of as 'data snacks', where we surface relevant insights based on the situation, e.g. you're 80% of the way through your monthly budget, which is really what we've heard companies at that particular stage value most.
Thanks! Yup - we batch up all approved expenses nightly and do 1 aggregated debit out of the company's bank account to kick off the payout. You know, we were also initially expecting to face more resistance, but it turns out finance departments actually really did mean well, but the tools (or lack thereof) that they had didn't allow for them to efficiently do a nightly payout. When you're doing things manually, it's more efficient to do things once every 2 weeks or once a month. By putting all of that on autopilot, we actually found the finance departments jumped on it because it's less work for them and the employees are not only happier, but also incented to submit in real time, meaning finance departments finally get real time visibility into expenses rather than having employees shoebox for a month!
Totally felt that pain! And honestly, your companies don't want to delay the payout - it's just a hassle for them to do with existing services. That's why we baked it directly into the approval process, so they don't need to even think about it - it'll just show up in your (employee's) bank account and sync with the company's accounting solution in the background.
I'm glad you asked. It's really just an entirely different approach. We’re not building another expense tracker (no offense - some people just need to track expenses). We believe the core of the problem is not in the tracking of expenses, but rather the back office workflow. We’re trying to solve a team collaboration problem.
In terms of quantifiable differences, it’s way faster for employees to submit and get reimbursed because we've extrapolated away the need to even create an expense report (submit on the fly), managers can review and approve right from the mobile and for the accountants, everything is on autopilot (accounting autosyncs in the background nightly, payouts are tied to approval and go out nightly, communications go out to employees with payout status immediately, etc.)