MacNoob

Before I begin, let me apologize for my long absence. The past two weeks have been quite busy for everyone in the MacNoob household. Between hurricane repair, Mrs. MacNoob business traveling twelve days and my day job, time to update the blog has been virtually non-existent. I promise to do better. (Yeah, right!)
The folks at BriteMac have made what has become an indispensable iPhone app for anyone who travels on an expense account.   JetSet has become the application worthy of elevation to my first home screen, right next to my calendar. I’ve been a business traveler for 25 years and tracking expenses has always been a challenge. My record-keeping (or lack thereof) has undoubtedly cost me hundreds of dollars over the years in lost reimbursements. Lost and/or forgotten receipts and other records have forced me to spend untold hours searching through luggage, calling hotels and writing creative, apologetic notes to accountants. All to often I wound up spending my own money on something my company should have paid for.
As of two months ago (when I purchased JetSet), my expense records are impeccable. I’ve taken three business trips in that time and [thanks to JetSet] each trip’s expense report was a simple 15-minute non-event. The only reason the reports take that long is because of my company’s nightmarish expense reporting form.  It is the result of some accountant acting out self-delusions of being a programmer while using Excel.  But that’s a subject for another day.
It is quite obvious someone at BriteMac has done as much business traveling as I have. JetSet couldn’t possibly be so complete otherwise. It is a well thought out, easy-to-use “Swiss army knife” for business travel. First, if you need to book your own trip, JetSet’s opening screen provides buttons for airlines, hotels and car rental contact information (both phone and web links).  I haven’t used this since my travel is almost always booked for me, but it is nice to know Avis’s phone number is just a couple of touches away.  There’s also a “+” button for creating a new expense report.  This is a bit of a misnomer because JetSet is really an expense tracking application.  Reporting consists only of a simple CSV file output, but I’ll get to that later.  Once you create a “report” JetSet begins to show its real strength, adding individual expenses.  Clicking the “+” while within a given expense report reveals a screen full of icons for 14 common expenses plus the ever-popular “Misc.” category.  Touching one of these takes you to a data entry screen where you can name and annotate an expense item and the really cool part, presents you with a camera icon for photographing a receipt.  This seemed a bit gimmicky at first, but when I started using JetSet I found it to be its strongest feature.  The reality of business travel doesn’t usually provide time for detailed record keeping of each expense at the time it is incurred.  The camera feature enables you to simply snap a photo of a receipt and postpone the detail data entry for later.  I found this particularly handy in restaurants, but it works well for hotel bills and cab receipts as well.  Basically, any time you’re in a hurry or don’t want to be bothered, just snap a photo and you’ve got a permanent record of your expense.  My accounting department even accepted a reprint of one of these photos on my last report.  Losing receipts is an all-to-common malady I suffer from, but it happens to even the most meticulous record-keepers now and then.

JetSet date stamps each expense record for you, but you can edit any portion of the expense at any time, including its date.  Can you say “creative accounting”?  Not that I encourage that sort of thing, but more to emphasize the fact that changes to records are not only possible, but easy.  An integrated calculator pops up whenever you need to enter expense amounts and it includes a button to store your resulting numbers.  This is a very nice feature, especially when you need to calculate some portion of a receipt that may include non-expense items, like hotel bills.  I usually have to subtract charges for movie rentals and the like.

Finally, JetSet includes the ability to transmit any expense report to a GoogleDocs spreadsheet in CSV format.  It’s not perfect, but clearly the lowest common denominator to work with virtually any reporting system.  Personally, I use Google for cutting and pasting expenses into my company’s report format and I retain the file with Google for archiving.

Clearly, it would be impossible to create an expense report application flexible enough to accommodate any company’s reporting structure without winding up with some unusable Rube-Goldberg P.O.S.  On the other hand, JetSet manages to incorporate every feature you need to easily track expenses when they occur and summarize them when its time to report.  This app is “three for three” in my experience and has become part of my normal workflow on every business trip.  I’m certain, given my past, that I’ve saved the $9.99 price of JetSet many times over by virtue of more accurate expense reporting.  Well worth the toll, and fun too!

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