- Free Expense Tracker
- Best Business Expense App
- Best App For Small Business Expense Tracking
- Apps For Business Expense Tracking
- Best Business Expense Tracker
It’s no secret that tracking your expenses is an important part of early retirement. If you’ve looked at my monthly spending reports, you know that I use CountAbout to track my expenses. Prior to using CountAbout I logged everything in a spreadsheet. This post explains why we’ve switched our expense tracking over to CountAbout and why I think CountAbout is the best app for tracking expenses and receipts.
From SpiritWorks Software: Activity & Expense Tracker is a time management and billing program that will allow you to track all of your business activities and expenses in one, easy-to-use. If you're looking for a resourceful and easy-to-navigate tool, Mint is a compelling choice.
Note– this is a sponsored post and contains affiliate links. While the content is sponsored, I really do use CountAbout to track my expenses and receipts. The sponsored post came at a great time because I have been excited to write more about how I use CountAbout to track our expenses for early retirement.
Why you should track expenses
Calculate your retirement needs
The most important reason you should track expenses is so you know how much money you need to retire. Many financial advisors based retirement calculations on replacing a percentage of your income. While that makes their job easy, it doesn’t help you figure out how much money you really need.
We only spend half of our income and save the other half. Therefore, retirement advice saying that we need 80% of our income in retirement is dumb. If we don’t need 80% of our income now, why would we need 80% in retirement?
When you’re tracking your expenses, you know exactly how much you spend each month. You can then build up a portfolio that supports your actual lifestyle. You’re in control and don’t have to chase an arbitrary number chosen for you by someone who may make a percentage of the money they help you invest.
See what’s important to you
Another great reason to track your expenses is to make sure you are spending money on what you care about. As James Frick said,” Don’t tell me where your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money and I’ll tell you what they are.“
If you say that family is important to you, hopefully your expenses reflect family vacations and family activities. If you say you value wellness but your expenses show an expensive fast-food habit, you might want to reevaluate what is truly important to you.
Find hidden expenses
Finally, if you’re not tracking expenses, you’re never going to find hidden expenses that are eating away your wealth. I’m always blown away by conversations with friends where they make an offhand remark about not being able to keep track of all of their streaming services. Um, excuse me, don’t you examine your credit card statements?
Because I track my expenses, I’ve caught numerous charges for services that I thought I’d canceled and was able to follow up right away. It’s one thing to consciously spend money on things you don’t need. Best photo apps for mac. But spending money without even knowing about it is the worst!
Why you should keep receipts
Health Savings Accounts
Health savings accounts are one of the best games in town. You can put money into the account tax-free. You can take money out of the account tax free. And your money can grow tax free.
However, you can only take money of the account without paying taxes if they are for qualified medical expenses. If audited by the IRS you need to produce receipts to show that the withdrawals were justified. That’s why it’s a best practice to use an app for tracking expenses and receipts.
Small business
Running a small business can be great. You get to deduct all of your business expenses. However, you need to document all of your business expenses. While you could, in theory, have a paper file in a filing cabinet where you keep all of your receipts, wouldn’t it be best to just app for tracking expenses and receipts?
Why CountAbout is the best app for tracking expenses and receipts
Tracking expenses in CountAbout
Tracking expenses in CountAbout is easy. You can link your bank accounts. Then, when you log into CountAbout it will automatically download all new transactions across your accounts and load them to your dashboard.
Before CountAbout will record the transactions, you need to review and inspect them. This is a super important feature for me. I’ve used other budgeting apps like Mint or Personal Capital and would “see” various dial gauges of my spending but never really “felt” their impact. That’s why I used a spreadsheet for so long. I wanted to get “physical” with each transaction.
You can also categorize each transaction however you want to. I hated how Mint would lump all of my hotel expenses as “travel” when most of my hotel costs were for work travel that was reimbursed. I wanted to characterize that as “work” or make it invisible from my finance tracking entirely. CountAbout allows me to have full customization, including the ability to split a transaction. (Did you buy makeup at the grocery store with a gallon of milk? You can split it into two categories if you want).
Attaching receipts in CountAbout
CountAbout also allows you to attach receipts. I use this to store all of my receipts for my business (the blog) and for my health savings account.
The attachment feature is super intuitive to use. The easiest way to add an attachment is in the landing screen where you review and approve transactions. As you can see below there is a paperclip button near the option to approve the transaction. This opens a dialog box you can use to attach a receipt. I’ve attached image files and pdfs. You might be able to attach other types of files too- I haven’t tried it out.
To retrieve your receipt later, you can simply find the transaction you want, click on the paperclip button, and your receipt magically pops up. At its core, CountAbout is a database. So it is surprisingly easy to query your transactions to find exactly what you need to find.
Side note: I also love that golden “a” button. I buy a lot of items on Amazon. Characterizing and tracking those expenses are difficult. Clicking the “a” button takes you directly to your amazon orders where you can find the purchase in question (and find the receipt, if you want to attach it).
What do you think? Tell me your best app for tracking expenses and receipts
Controlling costs is a central task for all businesses, and the job starts with tracking and reporting expenses. A plethora of well-designed expense report apps can help with this essential task. The best simplify collecting data by scanning receipts and importing transactions from debit and credit card statements. They can automate reporting as well as verifying charges and reimbursing employees. Cloud-based apps provide mobile access via smartphones while improving data security. New photos app for mac. Expense report apps targeting small and midsize businesses are also affordable. Here are the best apps for tracking expenses.
Choosing an Expense Report App
There probably is no expense report app that is best for all businesses. For instance, a business with a traveling sales force will have different expense reporting needs than one without external salespeople. Some businesses need an app that can handle international transactions, automatically converting currencies and recognizing both foreign and domestic tax regulations. Another concern is how well an app integrates with the accounting software a business uses.
Choosing an expense report app starts by looking at individual business practices, processes and needs. Factors for business owners to consider include:
- How many employees will use the app
- Types of expenses that will be processed
- The brand of software used for general accounting
- Technical skills of employees who will use it
Expense Report App Features
Free Expense Tracker
A good app will be able to do all the following:
- Capture data from scanned receipts, card statements, payment platforms and mobile wallets
- Organize expenses appropriately by category using rules set by the user
- Securely store data in the cloud where it can be accessed from anywhere
- Allow users to submit expenses and generate reports online
- Create reports to identify expense trends and excesses, cash flow, build budgets and project profit and loss
- Automate processes such as verifying and approving expenses and reimbursing employees
- Be affordable and scalable so it can accommodate the business as it grows
Top Expense Report Apps
Best Business Expense App
The following expense reporting apps are well-suited to small and midsize businesses with typical needs. They are easy to use, accessed through the cloud, offer good reporting capabilities and will fit into most budgets.
Expensify
At only $5 a month, Expensify provides great value as well as robust expense tracking features. There’s also a free trial. Expensify lets users capture receipts by scanning with a smartphone or importing from bank and credit card statements. It tracks mileage automatically using GPS. It automatically detects duplicates and categorizes expenses using rules and integrates with many accounting and management software packages including QuickBooks, Sage and NetSuite. On the downside, Expensify may be more difficult to learn than some of the other apps.
Rydoo
Rydoo users can input expenses by scanning receipts. Expenses can be allocated by trip or project. The app uses Google Maps to handle mileage. It’s well-suited for international businesses with automatic currency conversion and integrates with QuickBooks, Xero and Exact accounting software. At $7 per month per user, Rydoo’s starter package including its core features is an affordable expense tracking solution for businesses with five to 50 employees. Rydoo achieves a high level of ease of use at the cost of some more advanced tracking features.
Zoho Expense
Zoho Expense is the likely first choice for businesses already using some of Zoho’s other products and a contender for other businesses as well. In addition to a no-charge trial, it’s free for up to three users, and $5 a month provides unlimited users and extra features. Zoho Expense automatically converts all major currencies and reads scanned receipts in 10 languages. Data can also be captured from card accounts or emailed. In addition to Zoho Books, it integrates with QuickBooks, Xero and other packages. On the downside, mileage has to be manually entered.
QuickBooks Self-Employed
Self-employed people and microbusiness owners who are already using QuickBooks Self-Employed can probably get all the expense tracking they need from the accounting software’s built-in features. QuickBooks Self-Employed imports transactions from bank, credit card and payment systems, sorts them by tax category and allows users to build custom rules for categorizing. It’s got benchmark features like mileage tracking with GPS and using optical character recognition to extract data from scanned receipts. For $7.50 a month QuickBooks Self-Employed provides a broad set of accounting tools in addition to expense tracking and for an extra fee integrates with TurboTax to ease tax filing. Delete apps iphone mac. Of course, using QuickBooks Self-Employed to track expenses only makes sense if you are using the software for other accounting chores as well.
The Bottom Line
There are a number of well-designed, affordable apps that can help midsize and small businesses track and manage expenses. Cloud-based expense report apps provide security and easy access and features such as receipt scanning and GPS-powered automatically mileage entry reduce the time and energy needed to capture expense data. Most businesses will do well with any of these apps but carefully consider individual business needs before making a choice to increase the chances of selecting a winner.
Best App For Small Business Expense Tracking
Tips for Budgeting
Apps For Business Expense Tracking
- Before choosing an expense report app, consider talking the matter over with an experienced financial advisor. Finding the right financial advisor who fits your needs doesn’t have to be hard. SmartAsset’s free tool matches you with financial advisors in your area in five minutes. If you’re ready to be matched with local advisors who will help you achieve your financial goals, get started now.
- A free budget calculator is an indispensable tool for analyzing and managing business expenses. Also, if expenses exceed revenue, be sure to calculate your burn rate as part of an overall expense management protocol.
Best Business Expense Tracker
Photo credit: ©iStock.com/courtneyk, ©iStock.com/GoodLifeStudio, ©iStock.com/vinnstock