ProOnGo Blog

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!

Consultants, how do you spend your Friday?  If you are like many consultants we know, you find yourself spending a ton of time with clients throughout the week, then trying to make sense of your “billable hours” on Friday afternoon so that you are sure to account for your time & materials for the week.  After all, you don’t want those overhead hours to exceed “a certain percentage” of your time, do you?  (at ProOnGo, we know a few consultants close enough that we know a few of the pain points of being a consultant!)

Anyway, let us give you a better way to speed up your billings.  The newest version of our iPhone app (and versions of our BlackBerry app going way back to last year), make it easy to handle your billings like this:

1) Every time you spend time with a client, throw it on the calendar app on your phone

2) At the end of the week, crack open ProOnGo, and import those calendar entries as billable time

3) Run an Excel-based report from ProOnGo, to summarize hours spent, alongside any receipt-based expenses that you wish to pass through to the client.

Here’s how it works in our iPhone app (and BlackBerry is equally easy to use)…

First, press the “+” button in the toolbar to add a new expense.

Second, scroll through your recent calendar items, and tap on whichever ones you wish to import as time expenses.

Third, tap on the “Reports” button to generate a clean, simple, easy-to-understand spreadsheet that summarizes your billable time.  If you are a ProOnGo business-level subscriber, you can even get us to create your billable-time report in a custom format of your choice… so that you can literally generate your client invoice directly from the reports screen inside of ProOnGo Expense.

If you follow these three steps, you should be well on your way to spending LESS time organizing your billable time for invoicing purposes, freeing up more time to bail out of the office early on Friday .

Hey Everyone

It’s been a little while since our last blog post, so I just wanted to post a quick update to let you know of some of the big changes that are going on with ProOnGo Expense:

• Spanish Language version of ProOnGo Expense for iPhone – Our Spanish speakers now have their favorite expense-tracker in their own language. While it’s only available for iPhone at the moment, we expect to release Spanish versions on Android and BlackBerry within the next few months
• Mileage Expense Reports - Our subscribers will notice that there is now a new option in their Expense Report Format menu; Mileage Expense Report. This new report format is made exclusively for those that using ProOnGo Expense for tracking their miles. Filter your expenses to your Mileage Expenses and create a report and tell us what you think!
• Web Portal Look – If you’ve been using the Web Portal, you’ll notice there’s been quite a few changes over the past few weeks. We’re strengthening our Web Portal and have recently implemented a new My Expenses tab as well as a new Archived Reports tab. We feel this will make browsing your past expenses and reports a whole lot easier.
• Manager’s Filter By Employee – We also added the ability for managers to view individual employee expenses and easily create the employee’s expense report via the Filter tab in the Web Portal.

As always, if you have any suggestions you’d like us to implement, either within the app itself or the Web Portal, send an email Support@ProOnGo.com and we’ll see what we can do.

-ProOnGo Team

Hey All

A new version of ProOnGo Expense has just gone live on the Android market as well as Mobihand and AppWorld for the BlackBerry versions. We made some changes to the UI layout with the goal of improving speed and organization.

Speed

In the past, when users wanted to create a normal, non-receipt-based expense, unless the fiddled with their settings, the camera would automatically launch. Although this was convenient for heavy Receipt Reader users, it added another time-consuming step for users that didn’t need to add a receipt.

To solve this, we’ve added the ability to choose, when you create an expense, whether your expense is receipt-based or not.

Organization

Our expense categories are integral part of our expense-tracking system, as any custom spreadsheet user would know. However, it could get a little confusing remembering what you’re suppose to label your expense under ‘Field 3.’

In this latest version, we added a small but very effective fix at improving organization. Users can now edit their category titles, on the Web Portal or on the device. Not a big revoultionary fix, but we feel this was definitely a much needed one.

User requests

I just wanted to let everyone know that the past few added features, such as the ability to label your categories, have been customer requests. If ever you find yourself wishing ProOnGo Expense did this one thing, send us an email and we’ll see what we can do! Support@ProOnGo.com.

Hello Everyone

We made some big changes to our iPhone expense tracker that just went live to the iTunes App Store yesterday. Among the changes were some visual sorting for users to get a better idea of exactly how much money they are spending per expense category, as well as major improvements to our Employee-Manager workflow.

Here are the details:

• In the Graphs section, the Pie chart now shows spend by category; e.g., showing you what percentage of your expenses were for Meals vs. Entertainment vs. Travel (or whatever categories you have configured)
• In the expense list, if you use the Workflow features, the workflow state of each expense will appear in parenthesis after the dollar amount (Submitted, Approved, Denied)
• In the expense list, if you have a filter turned on, we now show at the bottom of the list a summary of how many expenses are shown vs hidden, due to the filter
• In the New Expense screens, once the picture of the receipt has been taken, it goes straight into the upload path rather than going into the image editor.  This speeds up the process of filing receipts.  The image editor can be turned back on via settings, for those that prefer to use it.
• Lots of performance and stability improvements.
• In the Sort/Filter section, we now have a toggle for Show/Hide expenses in the “Archived” state.  This new state will come in handy shortly as a way for non-workflow users to keep, but hide, expenses that are from prior reporting periods.  Previously non-workflow users had to choose between keeping such expenses in the New state, or the Deleted state, and that was not enough flexibility to handle prior-period expenses.
• In the expense list, we now show a network traffic indicator in the status bar, when the app is communicating with the server
• We added “clear” buttons (subtle gray “x” button in the right-end of an edit box) in various places throughout the app, including the username/password window, and the merchant name editor
• We now support creating very large expense reports via the Reports tab.  Previously, a user creating a report with 150+ expenses would likely see an error saying “URL too long”.  This error has been fixed.
• The “Settings” list options now match the exact order of what our BlackBerry and Android users have
• Fixed various bugs in Sort/Filter; we found a few specific cases where Filter and Sort settings were not being honored.

Check out the new version and see if you like the new additions. And as usual, send us an email if you have any questions or comments: Support@ProOnGo.com.

This weekend, we here at ProOnGo are are holding an app developer’s challenge for Illinois Institute of Technology Master’s students to develop an iPhone application in one weekend.

The challenge, dubbed the iPhone App Weekend Challenge, calls upon IIT Master’s students to develop a full functioning iPhone in application in just 48 hours.  Last year’s Master’s students were able to design an app that showed attractions on the campus of IIT depending on the phone’s GPS location.

This year’s app will provide a live feed of what is going on around on the campus of IIT based on the GPS location.  For example, if the phone is by the radio station on campus, the app will show what songs the radio station is playing and what will be coming up next.

The challenge is focused on showcasing the skill set of IIT Master’s students for perspective employers as well providing mentorship and advice from the ProOnGo team about planning out and developing new iPhone applications.

This year’s challenge will take place from March 20-21^st on the campus of IIT.  More information is available by visiting www.ProOnGo.com or by signing up here.  It is sponsored by the IIT Knapp Entrepreneurship Center and ProOnGo.