tedpower

9 ms·

31.
by tedpower 11y ago
Until we have 'common sense' AI (which is still probably quite a ways off), design can help expose the syntax that AI can understand. Here are some thoughts on that: https://medium.com/@tedp/how-design-can-h
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by tedpower 11y ago
I jotted down some thoughts about slack bots, NLP, and blending UI affordances into conversational interfaces in this Medium post
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How Design Can Help Bridge the AI Gap(medium.com)
4 points by tedpower 11y ago|1 comments
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by tedpower 12y ago
Abacus (YC W14) is eliminating expense reports. Submit expenses in realtime, and get paid out directly to your bank account via ACH. It's the fastest way to manage and pay your expenses. It's spooooky how easy it is to use (happy
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Abacus Raises $3.5M to Eliminate Expense Reports(blog.abacus.com)
11 points by tedpower 12y ago|1 comments
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by tedpower 13y ago
Agree that there needs to trust here, we're thinking about adding a setting where you can set auto-approval limits, so that any expense under $x get approved without any approval. Next time you're compiling an expense report or wa
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by tedpower 13y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by the second step 'later you go over all the bills and receipts again and try to match them with what you approved earlier' With Abacus, the payments are automatic. We also sync directly with your
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by tedpower 13y ago
If managers only want to log in and approve stuff in batch they're still welcome to do that with Abacus. But we've found that people quickly adapt to the faster flow — What we've found is: 1. Managers like the transparency of
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by tedpower 13y ago
Hey Michael, yup this still requires manager approval. Our manager approval is just about the easiest thing imaginable — managers get a push notification when there are new expenses, and they can swipe across the expense to approve them (li
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by tedpower 13y ago
Yea — we're trying to avoid the bajillion separate fields you have to enter, typical of Oracle or Concur. We try to do some smart things — for example if you're at a place (gas station, restaurant, etc.) you can select the place f
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by tedpower 13y ago
Your bank account information never touches Abacus's servers. http://support.abacus.com/hc/en-us/articles/200792470-Is-Aba...
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by tedpower 13y ago
Thanks! Yea we don't think that employees should be used as a 'line of credit' for their employers. If you purchase something on your company's behalf, you should be reimbursed for that expense as quickly as possible.
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by tedpower 13y ago
Just because expenses aren't submitted in batch, doesn't mean you can't approve them in batch. Having more transparency into incoming expenses is proving to be helpful for managers. What frequently happens in companies today
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by tedpower 13y ago
Hey I'm one of the Abacus co-founders — we hear you on not wanting to get blasted with a bunch of notifications. As a manger, it's up to you to decide how you want to review expenses. You can review them as they come in, but you c
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by tedpower 13y ago
We might look casual in those photos, but our ambition isn't small, and we're definitely not casual about security :)
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by tedpower 13y ago
> Being able to just shoot a photo of it with my phone might be enough? Yup, adding a photo of the receipt is part of expense creation in Abacus. In 2006 a new law was passed that made a photo of a receipt (like the one stored in Abacus)
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by tedpower 13y ago
Unfortunately Abacus is US-only for now, because the ACH network we use for payments is US only, and there's a lot of variation in payments country to country. Sorry to hear about the trouble you're having with your current soluti
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by tedpower 13y ago
Thanks Trey! Most of our early customers are ~5-100 employee companies. Right now most of our customers are other startups because that's who we know, but we're excited to expand to other organizations. We're gradually adding
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by tedpower 13y ago
Thanks for the feedback — Receipts aren't required. If you're worried about an IRS audit it's important to have receipts (images) for transactions over $75, but for anything under that it's up to the company / emplo
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by tedpower 13y ago
Thanks! Yea it was important to us that our pricing be 'pay only for what you use' because there's greater utility when companies add everybody on their team.
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by tedpower 13y ago
In all seriousness though, which features were you referring to that Concur has?
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by tedpower 13y ago
Yea, we encourage people to submit expenses more-or-less as they happen (takes 10 seconds!) then throw away the receipt and be done with it. People can still submit expenses in batches if they want to, but there's a lot to be said for
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by tedpower 13y ago
We think we're quite a bit easier to use for both managers and employees (not to mention cheaper)
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by tedpower 13y ago
We're similar to Concur, but simpler! We don't have 'expense reports' — each expense is submitted on its own, and we bake reimbursements right in — you get paid out right to your bank account as soon as your expense is a
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by tedpower 13y ago
Just pushed a fix should work now if you refresh
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by tedpower 13y ago
Good to hear — we're also working on auto-categorizing expenses (i.e. jetblue == travel, starbucks == meals, etc.). We're going to map the foursquare category field to our Abacus categories for local expenses, as well as building
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by tedpower 13y ago
Oh shoot we just pushed this new splash page last night, might be a firefox thing, will look into it. (all those links do is target the page down)
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by tedpower 13y ago
Hey we're Omar Josh & Ted, the founders of Abacus — let us know if you have any questions! Happy to discuss payment processing, ACH, why expense reports suck, etc.
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Show HN: Abacus – Killing The Expense Report(abacus.com)
120 points by tedpower 13y ago|66 comments
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by tedpower 13y ago
also, for comparison: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/billion...

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