The weekend is coming up and that means one thing. I have to do my expenses.
It’s time to organize my receipts and make an expense sheet and invoice document. After that comes the scanning – standing over the printer, making sure the wireless is working so it syncs with my MacBook Pro.
That will be followed by the email with the PDF files for all of the above. That will take care of my Saturday morning.
But today I had a briefing with OfficeDrop which now has a service that works with ExpenseMagic for scanning and creating expense documents from an iOS, Android device or your desktop. It seems good enough to offer the potential for eliminating much of the manual work I do in preparing expense reports during my precious weekends.
OfficeDrop has scanning and optics in its DNA. The company started as a service you could use to send your mail for scanning. The model did not work. People wanted to do the scanning themselves. So they pivoted, built a strong search engine to go with the scanning and now offer a combined storage and collaboration service. They see themselves fitting between Box and Dropbox, offering a service for small business people for easily scanning receipts, ideally from a mobile device. Google Drive is also seen as a competitor.
In March of last year, OfficeDrop had 10,000 registered users. It took three years for the company to get to that point. It then launched an iPhone app. Today the service has 160,000 users. People love the mobile app to scan receipts on the go.
Expense Magic takes receipts and creates an expense sheet that is available on the date you choose. It reads the receipt and processes it into an expense sheet.
To use the combined services, you need to create accounts with both OfficeDrop and ExpenseMagic. In ExpenseMagic, you connect your account with OfficeDrop. An ExpenseMagic folder then appears in OfficeDrop. ExpenseMagic does not offer an Android app but you can sign up for the service and use OfficeDrop to scan receipts and then place in the ExpenseMagic folder.
Here’s a demo:
I gave it a try. I downloaded the app on my Android, took a photo of a receipt and moved it to the Inbox. I then signed up for ExpenseMagic and connected the account with OfficeDrop. I can now see the image of the receipt in OfficeDrop and the ExpenseMagic Folder. I placed the receipt in the folder and then looked for it in ExpenseMagic but did not see it.
Healy Jones of OfficeDrop he had a similar issue when he first used the combined services. He said ExpenseMagic does the processing over night so don;t be surprised if you do not see it immediately.
I like this service and will see how it works for my next trip. The user interface could use some improvement. It took me a while to figure it all out. If I did not have Healy to contact I am not sure I would have continued with trying to sync the services. All it needs to say is check back later to see your report.
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