expense tracking apps

[Daniel Pocock]

Given the new focus on reimbursement, I thought it would be helpful to
raise the subject of expense tracking apps.

Smartphones and apps provide great potential, e.g:

- people can photograph their receipts while waiting for a train, on a
flight, etc

- people can use the touchscreen to annotate the images of receipts
(imagine an app telling them "tap the total price", "tap the date"),
when the receipt hits the book-keeper/approver, those sections may be
highlighted for faster analysis

- people can potentially log deviations from the budget in real time,
e.g. if they have to stay an extra night at a hotel

Various firms are already promoting proprietary, closed sources apps,
some of them only working with a specific back-end.

Therefore, I believe there is an opportunity to kill two birds with one
stone:

- simplifying the expense tracking/reimbursement workflow for NPOs

- providing a compelling free software expense tracker app that can be
used with any accounting/ERP suite and maybe some proprietary back-ends
like Quickbooks or Sage too

As a community project, such an app could take a more neutral approach
than apps made for corporate use.  Apps made for corporate use tend to
emphasize the features an employer wants, such as monitoring the user's
phone habits.  A more neutral design would emphasize some features
beneficial to the end-user/employee as well, such as keeping copies of
every receipt in a private email folder or alerting them if their
employer is tardy in paying them or if they go over some spending threshold.

Looking at it from a technical perspective, such an app might have
various connectivity options, e.g. emailing receipts, saving them to an
IMAP folder or posting them to a HTTP server.  Alongside each document
image, there could also be some XML or JSON description of the
reimbursement request.  Such a project might involve creating both an
app and a server for it.

Looking in F-Droid, there are a few apps which do some of these things
already, e.g.

https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=expense&fdid=wb.receiptspro

https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=expense&fdpage=1&page_id=0