ProOnGo Blog

If you’ve followed ProOnGo for awhile, you’ll know our long history with turning your receipts into expense reports. Our Receipt Reader service first hit the market back in the days when most smartphone-toting road warriors were still carrying BlackBerry, Palm, or Windows Mobile, and kept growing as the era of iPhone, iPad, and Android took over.

So, it’s probably no surprise to hear that following on our integration with 18,630 financial institutions, we’ve now launched iPhone and iPad compatibility for our receipt matching capability, in our longstanding ProOnGo Expense app (make sure you have v3.34 or higher).

Expense Reports on iOS, with Receipt Matching

If you want every nitty gritty detail about how to use the new capability on iOS, click on this screenshot walkthrough, but more likely you only need to know a couple basics. First, before you try this, you really ought to set up credit card sync so that your expense list is full of recent transactions.

Second, just tap on the Credit Card Receipt item in the “Add” tab in ProOnGo Expense (and snap a receipt pic when your camera appears):

Expense Reports & Receipts for Matching

Third, a few minutes later, check your expense list, and you’ll see a paperclip icon next to the expense (or expenses) that now have receipts attached to them:

Expense Reports & Matched-Up Receipts

We’re excited to bring this new benefit to you, because from the beginning we’ve said that we want to take all of the keystrokes out of the expense reporting process. And, if you use the above technique in tandem with our auto-categorization feature which even supports your customized chart of accounts… well, if you use all of that, it’s totally reasonable (and likely) that your next expense report will involve literally no typing.

As always, your feedback is welcome!

Have you moved beyond the days of piling up Excel spreadsheets, Word docs, and PowerPoints on your laptop, PC, or Mac’s hard drive? Good! With terrific cloud-based storage and collaboration options like Box (and it’s associated Box apps), there is no reason to take the risk of storing all of those important documents yourself.

Ready to hook up ProOnGo Expense to your Box account, to have your expense reports land alongside your other documents? Well, today we have good news for you: we’ve launched compatibility with Box, immediately available for you to try!

Video: Send Your Expense Reports to Box

If you haven’t yet set up a Box account, we’ll sweeten the deal: grab a free 10GB account complementary from Box, just for trying out ProOnGo Expense with Box! We have no doubt that you’ll prefer keeping your files on box, to have instant access to all of your files (far beyond just expense reports), from any web browser or mobile device. Enjoy your new 10GB account from Box, and we look forward to helping you get started with Box apps, particularly ProOnGo Expense.

We’ve blogged many times in the past about one of our more popular subscription benefits: the ability to forward HTML receipts and receipt attachments to our receipt reader service via email, at times when you don’t want to open the mobile app or sign into the web app. It’s an easy way to stay ahead for your upcoming expense reports, even if all you have is a moment.

It’s convenient for that quick moment when all you want to do is add a receipt, and you don’t want to take the time to add a memo or category, run a full expense report, or do anything else really, but you do want to make sure that receipt image is safely tucked away in your ProOnGo account.

Anyway, we’ve made the process one small step easier, for those of you on iPhone or iPad. You can now tap on “Email-In a Receipt” to have a “Receipt Reader” contact added to your iOS device’s contact list:

Once you’ve got “Receipt Reader” as a contact in your iPhone or iPad contact list, there’s no excuse at all to hold off on sending us all of your receipts, even the craziest, most wrinkled, crinkled receipts that you dig out of your pocket or purse. We’re ready for them, and your expense reports will be loaded with all of your receipts, to keep your boss happy too!

Expense-tracking falls into the type of problem; you didn’t realize it was a problem until it became a problem. So, if you’re like most tech-savvy business owners, you’ll hit Google.com in your browser and look for some small business expense software. Unfortuantely – there isn’t a whole lot out there. Most expense solutions like Oracle and Concur are tailored to large corporations and can become too expensive and bulky for small businesses to run efficiently. Here’s why ProOnGo is the ideal small business expense software for your company:

• Flexible and Mobile – No matter what device you have near you, be it your laptop, desktop, mobile phone or tablet, you’re able to record your expenses, Approve/Deny your employees expenses, create expense reports and sync with your accounting system. You can download ProOnGo for BlackBerry, Android, iPhone and iPad.
• Receipt Images – Receipts fade and IRS has no sympathy for you. With ProOnGo, you can create digital copies of your receipts by taking pictures of them and using the ProOnGo Receipt Reader to automatically extract the merchant, date and total amount from your expenses.
• Timesheets – If you employe contractors or your employees are constantly working on jobs for other clients, it’s important that they have an easy way to record their hours. ProOnGo has a really easy interface for recording your Timesheets and syncing them with QuickBooks.
• QuickBooks Integration – ProOnGo features the best-in-class QuickBooks integration. You can label your expenses with the Category, Customer:Job, Payment Method, Items, Classes and choose whether or not the expense is billable, then sync your expenses to QuickBooks as a Write Check, Vendor Bill or update the credit card register.
• The Best Prices - Most small business expense software is going to charge you an arm and a leg. ProOnGo offers a free 30 day trial and has prices as low as $2.90/user/month.
• We’ve Got Your Back - We’ve had horrible experiences with other services’ customer service. That’s why we make sure you’re going to speak with a real-live human whenever you have a question.

In addition to regular expenses and time expenses, ProOnGo allows you to record mileage expenses. ProOnGo uses your phone’s GPS capabilities to record where your trip starts and where it ends, so there’s no data entry for you to worry about. You can record a round trip in one expense, and I’m going to show you how:

Step 1: Create the Expense!

When you create a new Mileage Expense, ProOnGo will automatically log your current location. If you don’t want to use GPS, press the cancel button, then change “Auto-detect With GPS” to “OFF.” Enter your ‘To’ Address.

When you scroll down while viewing the expense, you’ll see that you can assign categories pulled right from your QuickBooks company tile to the expense.

Enjoy your trip!

Step 2: Stops Along the Way

If you’re driving to another location that isn’t your home destination, you can add that to the expense too! Open the expense, then scroll all the way down to the bottom. Select “New Mileage Starting Here,” and enjoy the drive! When you get to your destination open the expense and tap the “to” field. Tap the arrow to make the GPS find your current location.

Go back or tap the ‘save’ button to save.

Step 3: Expense your return!

Select the expense with the location that corresponds to where you are returning home from. Then, scroll down and tap “New Return Trip.” Your To and From information will load. Hit ‘Save,’ and you’re done! You’ve just created a mileage expense!

ProOnGo and QuickBooks have great integration; you can use ProOnGo to create a Vendor Bill or a Check for reimbursement, you can use ProOnGo to create an invoice, and you can even label your credit card transactions and they will update in the credit card registers in QuickBooks. You can also sync Time Sheets from ProOnGo to QuickBooks, now with Payroll Items!

What is a Payroll Item?

Payroll Items are only used by those who also use QuickBooks Payroll. Payroll items designate what types of hours are worked. Payroll items categorize the hours an employee works and assigns the correct pay rates to those hours; examples of payroll items are regular hours, vacation hours, sick pay, and one-time reimbursements. They can also be insurance-related or tax-related.

Payroll Items show on printed paychecks, so your employees can see exactly what their check is comprised of.

Payroll Items and regular old Items are different; while they both act as ways to categorize and sort things in QuickBooks, they differ in the types of things they categorize. You’ll never add a payroll item to a credit card charge or a vendor bill. You can, however, add a service item to a timesheet entry.

How To Itemize Your Time Sheets

First, let’s make sure your ProOnGo account is synced with your QuickBooks company file. If you’re not sure how to do this, check out this video.

Next, turn on the option to use payroll items. To do so, go to the Settings tab of the web portal, then click the ‘QuickBooks’ link. Scroll down until you see the box marked “Show Payroll Items in Time Sheets,” and click it.

Now that you’re synced and set up, you’re ready to go. Create a Time Sheet and you’ll notice a field for Payroll Items; select the correct item. After you send those time sheets to QuickBooks, you won’t have to itemize them again; any item you assign in ProOnGo syncs to QuickBooks.

Now your employees can enter and categorize their time expenses from their computer!

Pay day just got a little better.

ProOnGo has a work flow designed especially with businesses in mind. Employees submit expenses to managers, who approve or deny the expenses. We know that isn’t always the end of an expense’s journey, though. Sometimes the manager has to submit to the CFO, or another manager. Then that manager sends the expense off to their manager, and so on until the expense finally gets reimbursed.

ProOnGo lets you add as many levels of management as you want.

Here’s how to use it:

Start at the Employees Tab of the web portal.

Click the bright yellow “Add Employee” button, and enter in your employee’s information. They’ll be asked via email to confirm.

By now you may have noticed the ‘Add Admin’ button in the Employees tab and are tempted to click on it. I should let you know that there’s a difference between a Manager and an Admin. An Admin has the same rights and access as the creator of the account, most notably access to QuickBooks information, whereas a manager has the power to approve or deny the expenses of only their employees.

Once you’ve created the manager and they’ve accepted your invitation to get access to the account, they can add employees under them by going to the settings tab and clicking the “Add Employee” button. If the employee under them also has employees under them, the setup is the same.

Or, you can add sub-employees to a manager’s account for them, by clicking the “0 Employees” button next to a manager’s name. From that screen, click the ‘Add Employees’ button and add an employee as you normally would.

Here’s a pro tip: If you go into the settings of an employee by clicking on the gear tab, you can set an “expense limit” for that employee. The amount you set is the amount up to which the employee doesn’t have to seek expense approval. Say you set the employee’s expense limit to $2500. He can approve his team’s expenses up to $2500 without getting further expense approval from you, his manager. Then you can send them straight to QuickBooks.

Now your managers have managers, and your employees have employees. Now go, start filing expenses!

We just launched a brand new feature for ProOnGo that finally completes our expense tracking picture; ProOnGo can now download transactions from your credit card registers in QuickBooks and then sync any changes made to the transactions back to the credit card register. This way users are able to attach an expense category, Customer:Job, whether the expense is Billable/NonBillable, assign a Class and Product/Service.

Not to mention the ability to create a spreadsheet that contains receipt images for every single one of your credit card transactions. Stop drooling.

Credit Card Transactions from QuickBooks Credit Card Register —> ProOnGo Expense list

When you first  establish a connection between your QuickBooks account and ProOnGo, ProOnGo will recognize all of the credit cards registered. A credit card can then be assigned to a specific user (you if you’re a sole proprietorship, or if you’re a small business, you can choose from the list of employees) and ProOnGo will automatically retrieve the credit card transactions and add them to the user’s expense list.

Sync Credit Cards between QuickBooks and ProOnGo

Once the expenses appear in the user’s expense list, the users can open up the individual transactions,  take a picture of the transaction’s receipt, and assign a Customer:Job, Class, Product/Service, and denote whether the item is Billable/NonBillable.

Easily Label Credit Card Transactions With the Info You Need

One of the best benefits of hooking up your credit card registers with ProOnGo is that your employees have an easy way of attaching the critical information you need to a credit card transaction. When the transaction is first imported into your credit card register, the only way you can determine what the charge was for, whether it was billable or not, etc. is to go straight to the source of the expense; the employee.

Now, if employees can label their credit card transactions with:

• Expense Category
• Customer:Job
• Billable/NonBillable
• Products/Services
• Class

This way, the bookkeeper can login into QuickBooks and easily see the details of every credit card transaction without digging through papers and spreadsheets.

Attach Receipt Images to Credit Card Transactions: Prevent Fraud, Stun Auditors

Having receipt images corresponding to each one of your credit card transactions will do two things:

1) Prevent Fraud — Often times the credit card transaction will just list the vendor of the transaction, but not list what is purchased. With a receipt image you can often times see exactly what was purchased and at what price. This way you can see if your $1500 Home Depot transaction was really all just glue for the model airplane contest, or maybe there were a few extra items purchased as well.

2) Stop Audits in their Tracks — Auditors are like skydivers, or tornado chasers, or Ice Road Truckers — they crave chaos. If they are going to take the trouble of auditing you, you better have messed up or it won’t be any fun for them. Kill their fun. Email them an Excel document that contains a receipt image that corresponds with every credit card transaction you’ve made over the past three years.

Payee Names and Memo Fields: We fixed it

We love QuickBooks. We really do. It’s an awesome tool and it keeps getting better and better. But we noticed that oftentimes the Payee for credit card transactions is not pre-filled, and we think that’s absolutely essential for expense tracking scenarios.  We’ve added a setting to ProOnGo that takes the memos from your credit card register (like ‘DUNKIN DONUTS #45876 CHICAGO’) and uses them to update the Payee with a simplified, friendly vendor name like “Dunkin Donuts”.  Some users may determine that they may not want ProOnGo to automatically change the Payee, so you can adjust the setting to your liking.

No Discrepancies between your Expense Tracker and your Credit Card Register

If ever you make any changes inside your credit card register, the change will instantly pass down to the credit card user’s ProOnGo expense list, and vice versa; any changes made in ProOnGo will reflect in the credit card register.

Some of our competitors only do one way sync, meaning only one piece of the transaction (the credit card register or the expense list) will update. This can be extremely dangerous because if both systems are used regularly, any changes that aren’t propagated to both sides (the credit card register and the expense list) will result in serious discrepancies that will inevitably force you to audit yourself.

How to Get Started

This feature is available for both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop. Sign in with your Intuit ID at ProOnGo.com, complete the QuickBooks-ProOnGo connection wizard, then assign a credit card to a user under Settings->QuickBooks.

You already know about ProOnGo’s receipt reading feature for our mobile app, but did you know it works for receipts that you email to us? You can submit any .jpeg, .gif, .png, or .pdf file via email to your ProOnGo Expense account. Got an e-receipt? Forward that to us, too!

First, you’ll have to obtain your secret email from the web portal. First, log in to www.ProOnGo.com – make sure that you’re using the same information that’s on the ‘My Profile’ page in the Options tab of the mobile app. Then, click the ‘Settings’ tab, and from the menu on the left-hand side of the screen select ‘Other.’ You’ll see your secret email address at the bottom of the screen.

Once you have your secret email, you can forward receipts to ProOnGo. We support .jpeg, .gif, .png, and .pdf attachments, and also html email addresses. We’ll even convert html emails into image files so that you have record of the purchase attached to the expense. Plus, that image will show up on your ProOnGo expense reports!

Here’s a tip: If you’re emailing more than one image, use “Multiple” as the Subject.

ProOnGo makes filing expenses even easier with by letting you email in receipts! Just shoot us an email and watch as your expenses are created in the app!

Let’s say you’re on a business trip, and you’re staying at the Marriott. You’ve stayed for two nights, and had a couple meals at the hotel restaurant. Your company requires that your expense report contain some differentiation between the hotel cost and the cost of meals. However, you only get one bill from the hotel!

Don’t bother with making two separate expenses – just use ProOnGo to split expenses!

Here’s how:

First, create an expense using our Receipt Reader! The merchant name, date, and total amount will all be filled out for you.

Then, scroll down to the “Split Amount” field – make sure you tap ‘Enable.’ You’ll see an item with the total amount of the expense.

Tap “New Item” to edit the item. You can change the name of the item, the amount, and categorize!

To add the next part of the expense, tap the + button. Follow the same steps as before, then go back to see your expense split up into two items!

You can split up the expense as many times as you like. Splitting Expenses is just one more convenient feature from ProOnGo Expense!