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!

The IRS has requirements for how much money you can write off for an employee’s business miles.  The reimbursement rate per mile changes every year, so it’s important to check irs.gov for changing rates, but every year, the IRS requires business to keep a log of the miles traveled, including destinations, and the purpose for incurring the mileage.

That can be a pretty tedious process, so to make life easier on you, just let ProOnGo do it for you!

First, it’s important you set the rate by which you reimburse mileage. Launch ProOnGo on your mobile app, then go to the Options tab. Select “Mileage Tracking” and enter the rate you want to use.

Then, when your employee creates a new mileage expense, the distance, rate, and amount of reimbursement will be calculated automatically.

Not only is mileage tracking made easy by ProOnGo, but with this set rate you’ll be more prepared in the case of an audit.

Did you know: You can sync these mileage expenses to QuickBooks with just a couple clicks. Check out how we track mileage in QuickBooks.

Many of you that have been with us since the beginning will remember all the way back to when we were ‘just’ a convenient way to keep track of your receipts.  Since those early days, your feedback has led us to offer options to delight even the most well-travelled road warrior; including fully-featured support for mileage, time, receipts, and income – across our mobile apps and our web app – with ‘background sync’ to keep the web and mobile apps well-integrated.  Have you checked out our web app (www.proongo.com) recently?  You’ll see that our web app supports all of the same great expense types that our mobile apps support:

Mileage, Time, Receipts, and More!

Here’s a quickie.  Recently we had a question come in from one of our loyal ProOnGo Expense users on iPhone, saying that once in awhile our GPS address detection for a new mileage expense picks an address that is, say 1/2 or 1 block away from the actual location.  We can only do as good as the GPS on your phone, and although they are getting pretty good, sometimes that 1/2 block or block counts!  So, we were all too pleased to mention our drag-and-drop pin feature available on ProOnGo Expense for iPhone, where you can manually “pick up” and “drop” a location pin for a mileage expense, so that you can put the start or end address exactly where you want it.  Sometimes GPS doesn’t know best — you know best — and we understand that.

We don’t have a fancy marketing video of our GPS drag-and-drop pins, but we do have this engineering video, for those that want to see it in action:

Mileage Tracking – Correcting a GPS Pin

Like it?  Hate it?  Tell us at support@ProOnGo.com!

ProOnGo tracks mileage, as you might recall, and it turns out that some of the folks that write us most often about mileage tracking are the many regional sales managers that find themselves driving several hundred miles every week, from prospect to prospect and client to client.  We’ve heard the stories of personal cars that end up with 100,000+ miles on them over the course of just a few years, almost entirely due to business-related driving… all in the name of landing the big sale!

If that sounds a lot like what you do, then you are no stranger to tracking mileage, whether its for reimbursement or for tax deduction.  So, about a year ago, we added to ProOnGo Expense the ability to detect start and end addresses, and distances.  That new trick got quite a warm reception!

However, if there is one thing we’ve heard over and over, it’s that many of you find yourselves visiting the same client or prospect multiple times a year, and boy would it be nice to be able to just “save” a list of favorite start/end points. That way, you can pick from a list of “favorites” rather than always auto-detecting the street address.  Well, your wish has now been granted, in our iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, and Android versions of ProOnGo Expense.  The look and feel varies a bit depending on which kind of device you carry, but I think our iPad version turned out particularly good (see for yourself, below!)… Lastly, I should put in a plug to say that if you are a sales director or sales manager, and you think your whole team could benefit from this, we’ve got some pretty economical ways for you to roll out ProOnGo Expense to your entire sales organization.  Enjoy the new “Favorite Addresses” feature, and as always, don’t be shy with your feedback!

Recently we’ve had a lot of users come to us for our features related to Receipt tracking, that eventually ended up becoming hard core users of our mileage tracking features too.  We haven’t promoted our mileage tracking capabilities as much (we gave it a little mention here and will do more in the future).  There are some real gems in that part of the app for those of you that are required to track mileage for tax reasons or reimbursements.

The best place to start, depends on how you currently keep mileage records:

• Are you currently keeping track of odometer “start” and “stop” numbers, for each trip? If so, when you create a new mileage expense in ProOnGo, you’ll see our graphics that look a lot like an odometer, and you’ll be able to set your start/stop odometer by just tapping on that graphic.
• Are you currently keeping track of “starting address”, “ending address”, and “distance”? If so, you’ll love what we do with GPS — based on your latitude and longitude we’re able to guess what street address you are closest to, and we auto-fill your “start” and “end” addresses based on that.  You can click on the “Calculate Distance using Addresses” to then calculate how far you drove (or at least a great approximation).
• Are you currently tracking mileage by client, project, etc? If so, you’ll notice that our 4 customizable fields are available in mileage expenses, so that you can classify, categorize, and annotate to your heart’s content

Want to see all of the bells & whistles?  Check out the following screenshots put together by our engineering team, where you might just learn a thing or two about “tricks of the trade” for filing mileage expenses (you’ll have to click on the image to zoom in for full detail):

Rebranding ProOnGo Expense to fit your company.

Coming in early December, we will be launching the ProOnGo Expense White Label package. This brand new package allows businesses to rebrand ProOnGo Expense with their company’s log and color scheme, and we will upload this new app to the iTunes App Store.

How it works:

If you’re interested in getting a custom application for your firm, it’s a relatively quick and easy process thanks to the ProOnGo Expense Custom App Wizard.  All you do is:

1. Pick your splash screen color
2. Insert your Company Splash Screen image
3. Upload your app icon
4. Choose your color scheme
5. ProOnGo uploads the app to the iTunes App Store.

After you complete the wizard, you’ll be able to instruct your employees to the iTunes App Store market to download the company’s rebranded expense-tracking application.  You can expect the White Label Wizard to go live in early December.

Are you a tech savvy CPA that would like to become a launch partner with ProOnGo’s White Label app? Contact us here!

A few weeks back we launched our ProOnGo Businesses Packages. These packages allow businesses us to easily distribute ProOnGo Expense throughtout their company without needing to worry about individual subscriptions.

I want to take a moment and go over our Premium Business Package’s features and explain how these features can help out your business with expense tracking.

Up to 100 Users
With the a Business Package subscription, businesses don’t have to worry about signing up every single one of their employees with ProOnGo. They simply point to the ProOnGo Expense app in the device’s marketplace, and as long as they sign up with the company’s email address, the user will enjoy full benefits of a ProOnGo subscription

80 GB Receipt Storage
It’s important for businesses to have a back up of their receipts in case of an audit. Luckily, ProOnGo has businesses covered. We offer 80 GB or receipt images. That’s over 80,000 receipt images per year. All of this information is instantly recalled as soon as a business needs it.

Custom Excel Spreadsheet Integration
Most businesses contain expense report templates and as our Pro Subscribers already know, we’re able to take that template and have it automatically filled out with your expenses. Businesses will receive the same special. They just send us their expense report template and it’ll be fully integrated into the app within two weeks.

Credit Card Integration
We currently support American Express cards, but within the next coming weeks, we are rolling out our support to over 90% of banks in the United States. So businesses with ProOnGo Expense can have their employees business cards instantly sync with their expenses, so no manual entry is necessary.

24-Hour Support Guarantee
We guarantee a response to your support request within 24 hours of your request. Email Support@ProOnGo.com

Accounting System Integration Consultation
Need to import your employees’ expenses directly into your accounting system? We’ll offer a free consultation session to figure out how to import the expenses into your system.

5 Hour per Year Receipt Audit Assistance
When the auditor calls, we’ll be at your side. With a subscription to a Premium or Pro Business Account, your business will receive 5 hours of audit assistance to gather the receipts you’ll need.

Annual Backup DVD
Receive a DVD backup of all of your receipt images once per year.

If you’re interested in one of our Business Packages, but have some questions you’d like answered first, just shoot me an email and I’ll do what I can to help you out: Max@ProOnGo.com

Hello All

We just released our Credit Card Integration feature into ProOnGo Expense about two months ago, and it’s quickly becoming one of our more popular features.  The feature, which allows users to sync their credit card with ProOnGo Expense, imports the credit card’s transactions as expenses.

Well we’ve just granted access to the Credit Card Integration feature for our Trial and Lite Package users. The trial is only going to be around for a limited time, so sync up your card now and see how you like it.

Oh, and keep sending us your questions and comments to Support@ProOnGo.com!

This is part four of a five part series by Kevin J. Harris, the founder of QuickSolvers Inc, which provides accounting, consulting, and QuickBooks training to small businesses.

How bland is the invoice that you send out to your customers? Professionalizing your invoice template is necessary, and as simple as you can imagine.

Why is it necessary? If you want your customers to perceive you as the real deal, not only for themselves, but also for referring you out to their network, then a professional company invoice is a must. Sure, the standard QuickBooks invoice is sufficient, but it doesn’t say, “You need to take me seriously. You need to pay me. You need to build a long-lasting business relationship with me that will lead to more business for you.”

Instead it says, “I am a small, ho-hum business, and I have no interest in becoming significant. I am forgettable.” Sounds a bit harsh, but that’s the difference that adding your logo, removing unnecessary fields, and developing a clear & concise invoice can make.

Solution: Pull up the invoice screen in QuickBooks and click on “Customize” in the tool bar near the top of the screen. Add your logo, then go to the “Layout Designer” to resize and locate your logo correctly, as well as play around with the entire look and feel of your invoice. Click on “Additional Customization” to work with the titles of all fields, columns, etc.

Once you’re happy with your invoice design, consider emailing your invoices to customers. Not only will your customers receive your invoice quicker, you are now environmentally friendly!

As for sending via email, you can either use the “Send” feature in QuickBooks, or you can choose to go to the “File” menu, “Save as PDF”, and then attach to an email.