It is no surprise that the insurgence of mobile devices has transformed life as we knew it 5 years ago. And this change has had no small impact on every aspect of the meeting and event industry. Our new mobile technology blog series will feature some of the coolest new mobile applications we have come across in our travels.
In 2012 CareerCast.com, a leading internet career site based in California, conducted a study of the 10 most stressful jobs, and guess which profession came out as #6? You guessed it – Meeting & Event Planners! And we think you will agree that staying on budget and maintaining accurate expense records are most important yet often last priority with our busy travel schedules.
ABUKAI Expenses (www.abukai.com) is one of our corporate meeting planners’ favorite apps because it eliminates the effort associated with tracking and reporting expenses. With ABUKAI you just take a photo of your receipts with your smartphone and voila! ABUKAI will:
- Read the information, capture it and integrate the information with any existing expense management system you have.
- If the receipt has a phone number on it, the service will automatically look it up in a location database and include the full company information on the reporting
- Read and capture small handwritten notes on receipts (for example, if you want to notate that a dinner was with a client)
- Generate reports in standard Excel and QuickBooks applications
- BONUS: it can even read crumpled receipts!
This app has given us freedom from manual data entry, sending information to financial administrators, and leaves out the human error of expense reporting. Try it out!
