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ExpenseMagic: iPhone App Magically Manages Your Expenses

By Lemuel Cacho  

We've heard so many times that great things come in small packages. These days, it's no surprise if you can also find it on your iPhone. As magicians often pull rabbits out of hats, ExpenseMagic can do more than sleight-of-hand and illusions and make your expense monitoring more convenient. No more bulky receipts in your wallet or purse. An electronic photo of your receipt will do. Managing your expenses becomes a click away.

"The light bulb moment happened during a train journey," says Adam O'Kane, co-founder of ExpenseMagic. "I was on a train and I just had my ticket stamped. I was in the habit of losing my receipts so I took a photo of the receipt and emailed it to myself. I just thought that would be great if there was an app that made it easy for me."

That's how ExpenseMagic was born. The simplicity of the idea - of making sure that you get to track your daily expenses - is what makes the app elegant. No thousands of steps to follow, no million clicks to do, no getting lost in a labyrinth of instructions. All you need to do is take a photo of your receipt and the rest, as the clich� would go, is history.

Photo courtesy of ExpenseMagic

The app combines the reliable technologies of the iPhone, cloud-computing through cloud-based storage and outsourcing of the data to the company's partner in India. Even if you're on the move, say on a business trip, you can easily capture your expenses and send the claim email automatically. The app aims to make expense monitoring headache-free by making it simple.

"All you need to do is take a photo of your receipt," says O'Kane. "The image of the receipt is then automatically uploaded to ExpenseMagic's servers. What happens next is that our trained book-keeping operators will read all the important data off the receipt. The data which are captured and the receipt's image are stored in the cloud. After that the data is sent back to the user's phone. You can email out Expense Reports for reimbursement and accounting."

Photo courtesy of ExpenseMagic

However good an app is, the iPhone market is very competitive, with more than 300,000 apps in iTunes. The challenge for the company is to stand out from the rest of the crowd. To achieve that, the app's strongest features include a Manual Expense Entry, which uploads expenses for free (unlike its competitors) by manually entering the data while getting all the benefits of its cloud service. It also has Autoclaim, a unique feature of the app, in which expense claim reports are generated and sent out automatically to your line manager or accountant every month by email.

The app has a Diary Integration feature that attaches events to make accounts departments happy. It has full currency integration and is supported in 159 currencies. You will be able to set it at a home currency. Currencies are converted to home currency using data feed from Citibank.

A new Dashboard provides a summary of claimed, unclaimed and reimbursed expenses for every month which includes counts and totals. The app also comes with rewards. For example, it has a share tool that allows you to message your friends by using their email account, by posting it on Facebook or by tweeting on Twitter. If you successfully refer ExpenseMagic to a friend, you receive ten bonus tokens and your friend gets ten additional tokens. Finally, the app has a fully filterable reporting function with bar, pie charts and currency reports.

Photo courtesy of ExpenseMagic

With these cool features, it's no wonder ExpenseMagic is reaching the number three spot in iTunes Finance App Charts in the United Kingdom. "The features make expenses so much easier to deal with," says O'Kane. "We got a little lucky when ExpensemMagic was launched and Apple picked it as a Staff Favourite. We've also featured as New & Noteworthy on the App Store front page since we launched, and are in the 'What's Hot' section under Finance apps. Getting visibility in the App store is everything."

"The plan is to launch in Australia next, hopefully in September and then the United States," adds O'Kane. "The app is for anybody who claims expenses really. People that have shown the most interest so far have been individuals that are often away from the office or away from their desk. It's particularly useful for those who do a lot of travelling or client entertaining. But really the app is for anybody who wants to keep a record of what they spend."

Founded by Adam O'Kane, Lavni Varyani and Constant Tedder, ExpenseMagic Ltd was formed in February 2011 in a converted warehouse in Kennington, London. It was launched only last May 2011 and already has 15,000 users in the United Kingdom. Tedder, the company's financial backer, was responsible for Jagex Ltd., a Cambridge-based computer games company. Follow ExpenseMagic on Twitter.

Lemuel Cacho is a versatile writer specializing in business, technology and science. Contact Lem through NewsBlaze.