Expense tracking is extensively popular in managing both personal and business finances. But while personal financing does not seem like a huge burden, when it comes to managing expenses for the whole company, the automation of this process is inevitable.
A lot of money is usually spent on business travel and entertainment and the employer need to keep an eye on the company’s money. Employees, on the other hand, need to claim their expenses to get reimbursement. Apart from the process of reporting expenses itself, the necessary procedures and policies need to be followed. Sometimes the expenses are analyzed in order to avoid overspending or to rationalize the existing habits. These actions are very time-consuming, mistake-prone, and to be honest rather boring for both parties. That’s when technology comes to the rescue.
A good expense tracker will need to integrate with different types of software such as travel management, time tracking, payroll and others. Even text recognition might be of great help. Most of these functions (as well as some extra) can be acquired with the use of various APIs. For example, for foreign travel your app will have to be able to convert currencies (you can use Currency Converter API or Currency Exchange API). There is also Receipt Extraction API that retrieves the information from receipts. It will considerably decrease the amount of work done and save the time. Another method of automation is email parsing. Again, the data is not entered manually, but rather collected from incoming emails and structured to a known format.
AwardWallet offers Email Parsing API to extract information from emails and use it to track travel expenses. Instead of sending tickets and confirmations to human resources, the user forwards them to the provided email and then everything is done automatically. The required information about the cost of the trip is divided into categories and converted into JSON format. The process takes mere seconds, but the result saves many working hours and allows for a seamless workflow. AwardWallet supports most known email formats and continues to add more if necessary.