A Program to Sort Travel Expenses
The worst part about business travel has to be filling out expense account forms. Around my office the accounting department threatens to force us to sit down and write them up.
Only slightly less burdensome is keeping track of how much money in my checking account is mine and how much is company reimbursement for expenses that I have charged to my credit cards but have not yet paid.
Expense It! from On the Go Software in Marina del Rey provides some relief if you have an IBM or compatible computer. Although it may not be worth it for an occasional traveler, it can be useful for a frequent traveler, small-business person or large company.
The $130 program enables you to keep track of business expenses, assign individual expenses to individual clients and projects and bill expenses to clients. You can print expense reports on the standard forms that the program offers, or you can customize reports so they will print on just about any form your company uses.
Expense It! also helps you keep company and personal funds separate. If you set up a separate checking account from which to pay company expenses, the program will automatically keep track of the amount needed in that account as you do your expense reports. Even if you don’t set up a separate account, the program will tell you how much your company owes you and, if you keep it updated, how much has been reimbursed.
Thus far, there isn’t much competition in expense accounting software. I came across only one other program, Expense Easy from Para-Tech Systems Co. in Chicago. It was awkward to use and has such a limited capability that it doesn’t merit comparison to Expense It!
You can run Expense It! on a portable computer with a single 720-kilobyte floppy drive, the typical configuration of a low-end IBM-compatible laptop, or a desktop model with dual 360-kilobyte floppy drives, or any model with a hard drive. It needs 640 kilobytes of operating memory. The original version required too much memory if you already had a lot of memory-resident software in your computer. But the latest version uses much less memory.
Before you can use Expense It!, you must do some set-up work to make it match your needs. It comes with eight predefined expense categories, satisfying Internal Revenue Service reporting requirements. They are hotel, meals, auto, travel, rental, phone, entertainment and miscellaneous. You can change any or all of those and add up to 16 additional expense-category names. The program allows you to control how it will summarize and subtotal expenses.
These days the IRS allows you to deduct only 80% of the cost of meal and entertainment expenses. The program can change that setting if the IRS changes the rules.
Automobile expenses can be handled in several ways. First, there are three choices of auto expense categorization. One computes mileage at whatever rate your company uses for reimbursement. (But it allows only a single rate.) Another method provides a two-tiered rate, such as 24 cents a mile for the first 15,000 miles and 11 cents thereafter. Until this year, the IRS had a two-tiered system for self-employed persons. The third method is for people who get a flat rate per month for personal car use. It doesn’t compute a mileage rate but does keep track of mileage to compute percent of business use at year-end.
Each of these calculation methods can be applied to any of 23 separate vehicles that the program can track.
Speaking of calculations, two handy on-screen calculators are available as you enter expenses. One acts like a regular calculator, letting you add, subtract, multiply and divide amounts to reach a total needed for an entry blank.
The other converts foreign currency into dollars. You supply the amount spent in foreign currency and the exchange rate.
People pay business expenses in various ways and Expense It! allows you to characterize each with a descriptive payment code that distinguishes between cash, travelers checks, the company credit card and your personal credit card. Up to 15 payment codes can be established.
In a similar vein, you can create up to 249 codes to identify clients associated with expenses. Another 249 project codes can also be applied to expenses. Thus, each expense can be attributed to a client, a project or both--or neither. As a result, you can detail and aggregate your expenses virtually any way you need. (The codes, by the way, can contain up to 15 letters or numbers, including spaces and punctuation, and you can associate a longer description with each to distinguish it from similar ones.)
In addition to listing your client and project-related expenses, the program enables you to keep track of the hours you devoted to clients or projects. Simply type in the number of hours and the hourly rate, and the total is computed for you. The program does not offer you a complete billing system, however, because there is no place to store client addresses, account numbers and other invoice information.
Entering expense data is easy. A form is displayed on the screen, and you fill in the blanks. When the cursor arrives at a blank field for which you have established codes--expense-type or payment-type--a small window pops onto the screen displaying the codes. To select a code, either type its first letter or move the cursor to it. It is automatically entered into the blank field. You can scroll through the full list if there are too many codes to be seen at one time. Note, however, that codes are not listed alphabetically--unless you entered them into the list that way when you created them.
Creating a custom report to print expense data onto a company form is the most tedious task in the program. But you have to do it only once.
There are a lot of variables to contend with, but basically it is a matter of choosing what printer you will use, and the page size and orientation (vertical or horizontal) of the form. Then the program prints a grid on top of a blank form.
Next, you use the grid to identify coordinates of vertical columns and horizontal rows where you want to print each item of data in the report. My company form is particularly difficult because it is horizontal format on legal-sized paper with data almost to the edges of the paper. A custom report could be designed that fit the form close enough, but not perfectly.
If a company were to adopt Expense It!, however, it would be a simple matter to create a preprinted form and the program template for it to get a perfect match.
Finally, all the data stored by Expense It! can be transferred to other programs, such as spreadsheets or databases, for further use.
EXPENSE IT!A $130 program to produce expense accounts.
Features: Designed for employees and the self-employed. Match up to 24 expense categories to up to 249 clients or projects, track 15 payment methods and expenses for up to 23 vehicles. Helps separate personal and company funds.
Requirements: IBM-compatible PC with 640 kilobytes of memory, a single 720-kilobyte floppy disk, or dual 360-kilobyte floppy drives or a hard drive.
Publisher: On the Go Software, 330 Washington St., Suite 400, Marina del Rey, Calif. 90292. Phone: (213) 578-9595.
Los Angeles Times
