ProOnGo Blog

Just about every day, we get emails and calls from folks that are anywhere from one week to one year behind on their expense report (we’ve even talked to a few people further behind than that)!  We’re here to help.  First, we’ll want to help you clear out your backlog of historic expenses, getting those filed in QuickBooks correctly.  Second, we’ll help you get set up with an easy way to keep up with tracking new expenses in QuickBooks as you continue to spend.

Getting “Caught Up”

There are many ways to get caught up on your historic expenses, but lets start by assuming that you forgot to hook up Online Banking in QuickBooks, and that you’ve got a bunch of transactions from the past year that are flat-out missing from your Credit Card register in QuickBooks (or maybe you haven’t even set up a Credit Card Register in QuickBooks at all!).

We’ll ask you to start forwarding all of your receipts (as many as you can find) to your ProOnGo dropbox email, which will cause your ProOnGo account to start accumulating all of the merchant, date, and amount information for all of those historic expenses.  You might have trouble finding receipts for all those transactions, but at least it’s a start, and we’ll show you some tips for narrowing in on the transactions that are missing.

We’re sure that you’ll be able to get caught up on your historic expenses without much trouble.

Staying “Caught Up”

Now that you’re caught up on your expenses, lets keep you caught up!  Here’s the formula that works for the vast majority of our customers:

1. Get a Credit Card just for Business Spending: Try to keep your spending to credit cards that are specifically for business purposes (the worst is trying to sort out individual vs. business expenses all mixed together on one card)
2. In QuickBooks, set up Online Banking for your just-for-business credit cards.  You’ll end up with one Credit Card Register per card, and QuickBooks will download new transactions from your financial institution on a regular basis.
3. In ProOnGo, go to Settings=>QuickBooks to sync those cards into ProOnGo.  Anytime you make an edit in ProOnGo, the edits will sync to QuickBooks.  Anytime you make an edit in QuickBooks, the edits will sync to ProOnGo.  That way, you can have “anytime, anywhere” access to categorize your expenses via ProOnGo, you can delegate transactions to your employees as well, and all the while you’ll know that you are keeping QuickBooks up-to-date.
4. In ProOnGo, use Receipt Reader to submit out-of-pocket expenses, and reimburse yourself using the Write Check or Vendor Bill technique (not the focus of this blog post, but we’ve got lots of info about how to do this)

Why do we recommend setting up Online Banking in QuickBooks, and then syncing it to ProOnGo?  Because Intuit has a gigantic network of banks and credit unions that they work with, and if they aren’t compatible with your card, chances are that no one is.  In fact, Intuit has partnerships with at least 1700 banks and credit unions.  So, when you set up Online Banking in QuickBooks,  you are setting yourself up for a well-supported and broadly-compatible solution.

However, you probably don’t want to be glued to QuickBooks every time you want to categorize a transaction or have your employees categorize a transaction, right?  That’s why we recommend sync’ing to ProOnGo.  For example, perhaps you have a company of five employees, and each of them has their own card — with ProOnGo you can delegate each of the cards to their respective owner — and that owner receives the transactions in the ProOnGo Expense mobile app and the ProOnGo Expense web portal, and can categorize them interactively.  You can set ProOnGo up in a way that lets your employees choose the Customer:Job, Account (or Item), Billable/Non-Billable, etc.  And, you’ll know that their changes will be in compliance with your QuickBooks lists, because those are the “answer choices” that will be pre-populated for your employees to choose from, when they receive a new transaction.

So, you’ll end up with broad compatibility with just about any kind of card, and the ability to have yourself and your employees categorize the transactions from either web or mobile.  That should put your mind at ease.

More Questions?

Is your situation a little different than what we described above?  No problem.  We’ll help you through whatever the expense reporting problem is.  Reach out to us at QBinfo@ProOnGo.com.

Today we released the new version of our iPhone app, ProOnGo Expense, and we’ve made it even easier for businesses to customize the app for their employees.

One of the features we’ve added is Category Synchronization, and there is a story behind how this feature ended up getting a lot of attention from us very quickly.  About a month ago we posted a new offer at http://www.proongo.com/bizpackage that lets businesses send us their custom spreadsheet format, and we set them up with a special icon inside of ProOnGo that lets them export their expenses right into their own “special” spreadsheet format.  This new offer has been a real “hit”, because it seems like every small business we talk to has some kind of spreadsheet template for their expenses, and just about every format we’ve seen looks like a real pain to fill out.  So having this kind of custom spreadsheet filled out automatically is a real time saver.

Well, as we looked at all of the custom spreadsheets coming in, we noticed that ya’ll have some weird, wild categories that you file expenses under.  If I had to pick a favorite, it was one that looked something like this ‘#5123 – Discretionary Spend for Trip Extensions” (does that mean you can stay in Hawaii for an extra week?).  Needless to say, asking you to set up your device-side categories with such long and elaborate descriptions was out of the question, it would be way too easy for a simple typo to get in the way of having your device side categories match the categories that your custom spreadsheet is expecting.

Syncing Expense Categories with ProOnGo

The good news is, there is now “a better way”.  If you are a ProOnGo customer, we can help you “push” your exact category list down to your device, saving you the trouble of setting up those categories on your tiny phone keyboard.  To get more info on how to do it, drop us a line and we’ll help.  Check out the screenshot in this post to see what it looks like when we do “push” the categories down to your device, and also, as always let us know how you like the new feature!

Also new – a way to “review” Receipt Reader results without getting interrupted with a pop up, and a way to set up recurring (weekly, monthly, etc) expenses.  More on that later.

Oh, while we’re at it, let me put in a plug for the fact that we’re not JUST about iPhone.  Our solution works on iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, and Windows Mobile.  Our Category Sync feature works on both BlackBerry and iPhone so far.

Give it a try and let us know what you think (support@proongo.com)!