All Posts
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Survey: Would You Want An Accountant President?
We’re asking a simple question: what would it look like if the US public elected a former accountant president—and would you support them?
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AbaCustard: How To Explain A Web App with Whimsy
To help the company understand the way our web application works, the Abacus Engineering team invented a fun, accessible analogy.
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Why Apple Card Could Become the iPhone of Virtual Cards
By improving antiquated UX, Apple’s betting it has changed the aspect of credit cards that matters most to customers. Their goal: normalizing mobile payments.
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6 Cool Things You Can Do With Custom CSV Exports
Here are just a few of the things you can do with data made effortlessly portable in this simple, powerful file format.
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How CFOs Help Win Top Talent With the Perfect Compensation Plan
In a recent CFO Leadership Council session, Finance and HR professionals discussed how salary and company culture combine to attract great employees.
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Remix Your Expense Data With Export Builder
Introducing an easy-to-use CSV template builder that lets you export data instantly ready for upload into Sage, Dynamics, Oracle, or any other platform.
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Air On The Side Of Real Time With Abacus Corporate Travel Booking
Introducing Abacus Travel: a corporate travel booking portal accessible right inside the Abacus real time expense reporting platform.
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How We Completed a (Partial) TypeScript Migration In Six Months
How our Engineering team moved all our React-based code and all new front-end development to TypeScript, without delaying or postponing feature development.
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So You Want to Write About Product Development…
How we’ve designed our new engineering blog, and what you can expect from it this year.
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Three Keys To Great Interview Candidate Reimbursement
In the war for top talent, a great interview experience is a competitive advantage. Here’s how you can reimburse job candidates’ expenses in a scalable, secure way they’ll love.
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Make Yourself In-Demand: How Finance Leaders Do Personal Branding
Personal branding in finance is not about getting famous or bragging on social media. It’s about making your work known and becoming in-demand.
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The 5 Best CFO Conferences of Spring 2019
Among all the educational gatherings available to CFOs and finance leaders this conference season, here’s our list of the five most valuable.
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3 Surprising Factors That Determine The IRS Mileage Rate
The IRS standard mileage deduction isn’t based on just the cost of gas. It’s actually an index that combines diverse data from across the economy.
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What Abacus Cooked Up In 2018
Here’s a look back at our projects, people, and fun moments from 2018. Includes a link to “Cooking The Books,” the year-end cookbook we produced entirely in-house.
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Humans Of Abacus Part 2: Product Support’s ASMR
See what life is like on our Product Support team in this interview, and watch a video testing whether they all share the sensory condition known as ASMR.
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Humans of Abacus Part 1: Know Your BDR
Sean, Linda, and Jeremy are a pretty tight-knit team. But how well do they actually know each other? Find out in a game we like to call “Know Your BDR.”
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How to Earn the Paid Family and Medical Leave Tax Credit
Businesses that offer paid family and medical leave to employees making less than $72,000 may be eligible to recover up to 25% of that cost. Will it work?
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SAML-Based SSO For Real Time Expense Reporting
Abacus now supports Single Sign-On, giving your employees seamless access to real time expense reporting.
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5 Topics CFOs Need To Learn About In 2019
As CFOs lead their teams into 2019, they see a landscape marked by turbulence and instability. Here’s what they need to learn to stay ahead of the curve.
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5 Ways The New FAA Bill Impacts Business Travel
Within this 1,200-page bill are these provisions to improve the experience of booking travel and flying for business.
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Abacus Expands Insights for Managers
Introducing a new level of visibility for Managers: now mid-level approvers in Abacus can track and report on every expense submitted by their teams.
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Here’s What The 2019 IRS Per Diem Rates Buy You In 10 US Cities
This is how much the IRS will let your company deduct in business travel to these US cities through September 30, 2019.
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How Blockchain Could End Expense Receipt Fraud
How distributed ledger technology frees employees from including receipts with their expense submissions—and reviewers from having to worry about fraud.
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New in Abacus: Bulk Upload Employee Records
Abacus has added the ability to add, update, and deactivate employee records with one convenient CSV upload.
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Here’s How Much A 4-Day Work Week Saves On Business Expenses
The four-day work week is a trendy way to offer employees flexible hours and a better work-life balance. Here’s how transitioning to a shorter week could also benefit a company’s bottom line.
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Why 2019’s “Postcard” Form 1040 Is Not Shorter (Or Better)
Politicians like to promise they’ll make taxes simple enough to pay on a postcard. Here’s how the IRS finally tried to do it—and ended up taking a step back.
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Calculated Changes: A Look Into Abacus’ Brand Update
Abacus has a new logo! In this post, designer Annie Dailey takes us inside the massive brand update that gave us a new wordmark and color palette.
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WeWoke: A Case Study In Driving Culture Through Your Expense Policy
WeWork’s controversial new meat-free rule demonstrates how an expense policy can drive culture and control costs at the same time.
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Abacus HQ has moved!
After four years in Flatiron, Abacus has moved into a larger space near Bryant Park. Here’s what we did to set up our new office!
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Introducing Multi-Subsidiary Expense Management with Connected Orgs
Abacus is excited to announce Connected Orgs, a multi-subsidiary expense management solution designed specifically for mid-market organizations.
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5 Health Risks of Frequent Air Travel (And How To Prevent Them)
Business travelers who spend a lot of time flying have a higher risk of these health risks than the average, earth-bound employee. Here’s what you can do.
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The 5 Best CFO Summits of Fall 2018
We looked through all the events being put on this fall to find the best thought leadership conferences for finance leaders.
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Why Can’t Your Expense Reporting Software Do This?
Real time expense reporting doesn’t use expense reports. Sound crazy? Here’s why modern accounting requires a managed flow of granular, real time data.
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What Is The IRS Taxpayer Bill of Rights?
In 2014, the IRS laid out 10 guarantees to taxpayers that assured due process, fair tax collection, and the privacy of taxpayer data.
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What’s The Difference Between Personal, Business, and Commercial Credit Cards?
To find the right card program for your organization, here’s how to analyze personal, small business, and enterprise-level card programs side by side.
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Why Fintech Wants to Free Your Credit Card Data
Inside the movement to give small and medium-sized businesses an enterprise level of data ownership.
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Abacus Completes SSAE 18 / SOC 1 Type II Certification
Abacus is excited to announce that we have completed our Service Organization Controls (SSAE 18 / SOC 1) examination.
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The 5 Biggest Takeaways From the 2017 IRS Data Book
The IRS has released a report on the agency’s activities in fiscal year 2017, from October 2016 through September 2017. Here are the 5 biggest takeaways.
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How Client First Automated Expenses In NetSuite With Abacus
How Client First Settlement Funding enlisted Abacus to seamlessly integrate their expense management tracking into NetSuite.
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5 Steps CFOs Can Take To Become Chief Performance Officers
How today’s finance leaders can transition into a forward-looking role that applies the CFO’s natural analytic ability toward the creation of real strategy.
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How To Create A Commuter Benefits Program in 2018
Here’s how businesses can create or refresh their qualified transportation programs in an era in which fringe benefits are no longer tax deductible.
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Laying The Groundwork For More Powerful Expense Reporting
Abacus has been making big improvements behind the scenes. Today we announce one of the first results: a feature that makes search more powerful.
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7 Questions We Have About Deductible Expenses Under The New Tax Law
With the most sweeping tax law in a generation taking effect, here are the questions we have outstanding about deductible employee expenses.
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5 Reasons Your Business Should Be Using Cloud Accounting Software
Accounting software solutions save you the time you’d spend doing it yourself while giving you confidence that your business is running in tip-top shape.
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How Structured Data Enables AI in Finance
Targeted automation helps your team work efficiently, accurately, and completely. Here’s how to be tactical with your investment in AI.
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Why Accounting Will Continue To Be The Most Profitable Industry In The US
Year after year, accounting firms are the most profitable industries for small businesses in the US. Here’s what that will remain the case for years more.
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Dawn of the Data Controller: What Finance Needs To Know About GDPR
In May 2018 the EU’s sweeping new privacy law will go in effect, bringing with it implications for companies around the world. Here’s what you need to know.
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Reviewing (And Approving) 2017 at Abacus
At Abacus, 2017 was full of feature launches, new faces, and big initiatives. Here’s a look back on how we spent the year.
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Stop Bashing Excel. Start Using It Right.
Spreadsheets aren’t meant to manage your critical finance processes. Here’s how to use the right tools for the job alongside Excel.
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A Year-End Checklist To Start 2018 Right
The end of the year is the best time to think about how you can best set up your team for the year ahead. Here are 5 ways to hit the ground running in 2018.
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The 10 Best (Inexpensive) Gifts For Business Travelers
Business travel gets difficult sometimes. Help make it a easier for the travel pro in your life with these 10 gifts that won’t break the bank.
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The 8 Most Influential PowerPoint Presentations In History
To celebrate the 30th birthday of Microsoft’s legendary software, we’ve ranked the moments when a famous slideshow changed everything.
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The 5 Best CFO Summits of Spring 2018
We dug through all the listings to find you the 5 best thought leadership conferences for finance leaders this upcoming conference season.
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Here’s What The 2018 IRS Per Diems Get You In 10 US Cities
The IRS has announced 2018’s per diem dollar amounts. Here’s how much you’ll be allowed to deduct in business travel to these 10 US cities.
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How to Identify and Calculate Fringe Benefits In Your Employee Expenses
Your guide to finding and processing the imputed income you remit through employee expense reimbursements.
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Ranking The Features of AI-Enabled Excel 2019
Microsoft recently previewed the forthcoming release of Excel. Here we present the new features, graded by your likelihood of actually using them.
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Why Automation Drives the ROI of T&E Spend
Many companies are getting less return from their spending on travel and employee expenses than they should. Expense automation is here to help.
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What You Need To Know About Cybersecurity Insurance
Cybersecurity insurance helps businesses cover the costs associated with a digital breach or theft. Here are some basic concepts to get you started.
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We’re Not In The Era Of Millennial CFOs Yet
Why a youth movement at the top of the finance department isn’t happening yet—and why that’s probably a good thing.
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How to Protect Your Business Against Natural Disaster
There’s no easy way to pick up the pieces after a natural disaster affects your business, but there are ways to be prepared.
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The 5 Best Accounting Discussion Forums Online
We’ve scoured the web to find the best places for accounting advice and conversation. Forums are ranked on post frequency and quality.
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Get More Company Expense Insights in Abacus
Insights in Abacus is a powerful way to drill down into your company expense data and report on meaningful analysis.
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5 Questions That Will Help You Decide If You’ve Outgrown QuickBooks
Graduating from QuickBooks is a big investment. But if you answer yes to any of these 5 questions, it might be time to start considering an ERP.
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Why Finance Teams Need Data Visualization
As data proliferates, tomorrow’s influencers will be the human analysts who can use visually represented information to tell stories.
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Introducing Abacus Mileage Calculation
Abacus now includes a seamless mileage calculator that uses Google Maps to create route images and expense submissions.
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Why Finance Is The Organization’s Natural Analyst
Finance is frequently said to have the ideal vantage from which to influence strategy inside the organization. We look at five reasons why that’s the case.
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How We Organized Abacus Retreat 2017
With our 2017 retreat in the books, here are a few tips other teams of around 25 people can use to plan a fun, productive company getaway.
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What Would A Blockchain Expense Policy Look Like?
Even if your business doesn’t transact in crypto assets, blockchain could transform the way you manage employee expense reporting.
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Abacus and Lyft Team Up to Automate Expensing Rides
Riders can now send work-related Lyft trips directly into Abacus, where the expense will be automatically drafted.
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5 Things AEC Firms Should Track with Expense Reporting
The 5 data points that AEC firms and other project-driven organizations need to track to see the direct impact expense reporting has on their bottom line.
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Solve, See, & Say: How to Evaluate Finance Software For ROI
Every new piece of software needs to help your finance team transform into a center of business intelligence. Here’s how you can maximize the right ROI.
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View From The Cheap Seats: How Basic Economy Airfare Is Impacting Travel Policies
As the experience of U.S. air travel declines, here’s how finance teams are adjusting their travel policies in response. (Hint: it’s not all bad.)
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Travel Smart: Introducing Abacus Trips
Abacus is excited to debut Trips and Daily Rate policy rules, two features that make it easier to track travel expenses in real time.
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AI Is Coming To Finance. Here’s What You Need To Know.
As AI revolutionizes finance, you can elevate your team to new levels of efficiency and influence by developing an AI strategy. Here’s how to get started.
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Announcing the Abacus Partner Program
We’re excited to announce the launch of the Abacus Partner Program, an initiative that will help us bring real time expense reporting to more finance teams.
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How to Create a Bleisure Travel Policy
“Bleisure” is when an employee tacks days onto a business trip and turns it into a vacation. Here’s how you can create a policy guiding this practice.
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Free-Form Custom Expense Fields Are Here
Looking to track expenses by a unique identifier? We’ve launched a new type of custom expense field that allows employees to enter free-form text.
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What Does Same-Day ACH Really Mean?
The backbone of the US payments system is about to speed up. This is what’s actually changing, and how it will affect your team.
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The ROI of Real Time Expense Reporting
Real time Live Reports sort expenses into the groups that make sense for your review. Here’s how that returns your investment 5x in recovered productivity.
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The Must-Have Checklist for Cloud ERP Software
Cloud ERP delivers real time data while being stable enough to maintain your most important data. Each component of your cloud ERP stack needs to have:
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How To Create A Cell Phone Reimbursement Policy
Creating a policy to provide employees mobile technology can be tricky. Cut through the confusion by reimbursing employees through your expense workflow.
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Live Reports are the New Expense Reports
Abacus is excited to announce Live Reports – the new approach we’re taking to replace the expense report and improve how you review and approve expenses.
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The Story of ERP: From On-Prem to SaaS and Beyond
See how enterprise resource planning systems developed with cloud technology and empower the arrival of artificial intelligence.
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Beyond The Receipt: How To Automate Your Expense Record
Having a receipt isn’t enough. Real time automation ensures all your data is captured accurately and every expense will adhere to IRS regulations.
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What We Launched In February
In the first two months of 2017 we’ve built an Intacct integration, bulk expense field edits, Expense All functionality, and new ways to split expenses.
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The 3 Trends Transforming Enterprise Software
How integrations, automation, and consumerization are coming together to change the tools we use at work.
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Meet The Modern Finance Team: 5 Things We Learned From “Benchmarking The Accounting & Finance Function”
Robert Half’s 2016 survey, “Benchmarking the Accounting and Finance Function,” is a snapshot of an industry and department in flux.
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The 5 Best CFO Summits of 2017
We dug through the dozens of CFO forums being put on this year to find the best events for you to attend.
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Submit Expenses For Others With New Delegates Feature
Abacus is rolling out a new feature called Delegates that lets employees submit corporate card expenses on behalf of other team members.
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The IRS Got the 2017 Standard Mileage Rate Wrong
Is the new standard mileage reimbursement rate already due for an update? Here’s why even Uncle Sam could stand to use real time business insights.
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Get Served with Suggested Expenses on iPhone
This week, Abacus launched a new version of our iPhone app that serves employees automatically drafted expenses ready for one-touch submission.
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Reviewing (and Approving) 2016 at Abacus
Here’s a look back at the features and products that made 2016 a huge year for Abacus.
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Why Expense Automation Makes Humans More Important
Most automation replaces human labor. Here’s why expense management solutions make finance team members more essential than ever.
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Approval Routing Puts Expenses On The Right Track
Approval routing is an exciting new feature that lets you direct specific expenses to specific approvers, as the expenses flow in.
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Abacus Wins “Highest Customer Satisfaction” in G2 Crowd Poll
G2 Crowd’s Winter 2017 Expense Management Software GridSM report awarded Abacus an industry-leading 99 out of 100 in the category of customer service.
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The Elastic Risk Approach to Expense Management
A new method of reviewing and approving expenses delivers granular control and efficiency to T&E — entirely free of the obsolete expense report.
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Improved Notifications for Abacus Admins
We’re rolling out new Abacus account notifications for admins to make sure you keep your expense reporting flowing smoothly.
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How Abacus Prevents Duplicate Submissions
Submitting the same transaction twice is one of the more common mistakes employees make when expensing. Here’s how we prevent it.
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Bowery CFO Summit Recap: SaaS Finance Leaders Talk Funding, Planning, and Growing
Last Thursday, Abacus attended an event that gathered a hundred professionals to discuss everything about SaaS finance. Here’s the best of what we learned.
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Abacus Now Integrates with Zenefits
Abacus is now integrated with Zenefits to remove duplicate work for both admins and employees, making it easy to keep records consistent across platforms.
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Salesforce and Abacus – Some Things are Just Better Together
Abacus is excited to announce an integration with Salesforce that brings sales and expense data together, empowering end-to-end business insights.
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Changes to Receipt Capture in iOS and Updates to Slack Integration
We made some changes to receipt capture in the Abacus iOS app, as well as updated our Slack integration for employee expensing.
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How To Build Your Travel Policy In Abacus
A guide to implementing your travel expense policy using Abacus’ rule builder.
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Inventing Javacus: How Our Office Workshopped Internal Feedback
Abacus recently collaborated with Community x Design to workshop feedback practices that fit our team. Here’s what we came up with.
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Know Your Rights As An Air Traveler
Flight troubles are a sure way to turn a good trip bad. Before you take off (or vainly attempt to take off) here’s what you need to know.
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How CAPEX and OPEX Can Drive Employee Retention
Most companies don’t look to their finance teams for wisdom on the topic of employee happiness, but maybe they should.
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3 Cool Things Abacus Can Do With QuickBooks
Direct integration is a beautiful thing. Here are three things you can do when you pair Abacus with QuickBooks.
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5 Ways To Get Corporate Card Holders To Actually Submit Expenses
Chasing down corporate card expense reports is all too familiar to most finance teams. Here are five ways to get people to actually submit their expenses:
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Abacus, Slack, Greenhouse, and Trello On the Future of Enterprise Tech
How will enterprise technology change the way employees work? On August 2, four tech execs gathered at Manhattan’s Work-Bench to find out.
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Smarter. Faster. Better. Stronger. Automated Expense Reporting
We are excited to announce Suggested Expenses, bringing data signals into Abacus for smarter automated expense reporting.
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How to Supercharge Your SaaS Metrics with Expense Data
Once an expense has been submitted it’s not usually given a second thought except “I wonder when I’ll get paid back.” In reality, expense data directly correlates with the success of your company and the all important SaaS metrics that drive your strategy. Traditional SaaS metrics include reports like monthly (or annually) recurring revenue, churn,… View Article
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Corporate Apartment vs Hotel vs Airbnb
Is investing in corporate housing right for your organization? What to consider when calculating ROI and other alternatives that might be a better fit.
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The New Look of Expense Report Automation
Abacus has been making improvements to the look of the product, as well as how expenses are created and approved. Learn more about our new features.
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Abacus is Now Integrated with Slack!
Abacus is now integrated with Slack to bring expense reporting to the place you’re already working.
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Will Finance Teams Still Exist in 2025?
Will the finance team we currently know soon no longer exist? As the role of finance changes, the structure and needs of the team will change as well.
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Lever Talent Innovation Summit Recap
As a proud sponsor, we’re recapping Lever’s inaugural Talent Innovation Summit with conference highlights, Tweets and photos.
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Best Practices for Recognizing Employee Expenses on an Accrual Basis
Challenges finance teams face when recording employee expenses when they use the accrual method and the best practices for overcoming those challenges.
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Faster than The Flash – New Receipt View with One-Click Approve
Reviewing expenses is now a thing of legendary proportions…with Receipt View administrators can speed through approving expenses with a single keystroke.
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NetSuite NYC Event: Finance Experts Talk Globalization, Metrics & Fundraising
The NetSuite event was attended by heads of finance and covered topics that ranged from expanding globally to metrics that matter to fundraising and exits.
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Why Finance Needs a Business Analyst & What to Look For
Finance teams are under new pressures to deliver information beyond the balance sheet. A business analyst will help analyze data and tell it’s story.
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6 Ideas for How Businesses Could Use Virtual Reality
As virtual reality becomes an adopted technology by the general public, it’s applications become endless. Here are 6 ideas for how businesses can use VR.
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Customize Abacus with Your Company Logo and Colors
Our latest product feature helps strengthen how companies communicate about expenses by enabling them to customize the appearance of their Abacus account.
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How to Create a Design Driven Culture
Having a design driven culture is vital for companies of all shapes and sizes because being in sync with your purpose will help prioritize design and product decisions.
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How to Create a Winning Worksheet for Your SaaS Demo
How to create a SaaS demo worksheet that will get your sales team ramped up and performing first-rate demos – includes an editable worksheet to get started.
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IRS Guidelines and Best Practices to Manage Employee Expenses
Employee expenses can be a challenge for finance teams to manage. Learn about requirements, options, and best practices, to preemptively lessen headaches.
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Accrual Expense Sync Available for Xero Integration
Abacus is expanding accrual basis sync capability to our customers who are using our Xero integration.
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Thoughts From a Recent Grad: The Allure of Startups
How a recent engineering graduate thinks about startups, how they cultivate their culture, and what she was looking for when searching for her first job.
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2015 Travel and Expense Data: How Tech Startups Use their Funding
Everyone is always comparing east and west coast startup scenes. So we wanted to know – how different are they? [2015 T&E data infographic]
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New Ability to Reroute Expenses for Manager Approval
Abacus now gives admins and managers the option to reroute an expense to another approving manager to provide the first level of approval before it’s handed off to an admin.
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Adding More Context: Split Expenses and Hotel Stay Dates
We’re excited to now offer the ability to split expenses across categories, as well as capture check-in and check-out dates for hotel stays.
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Big Announcement: Introducing Accrual Accounting Sync
Abacus customers can now choose between a cash or accrual accounting method for their sync, and Abacus will automate the bookkeeping.
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Where the Hell is My Money?! The Dirty Secrets of ACH
We’re covering how ACH works to shed some light on why it takes so long to move money from one bank account to another.
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Advice for When the Competition Starts Imitating You
What it means when the competitions starts to copy you, the impact on your business and advice for how to handle it.
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Abacus 2015 End of Year Feature Wrap Up
New features from Abacus to help you get a head start on a productive 2016 with a more streamlined workflow and improved real time expense reporting.
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Taking Ownership of the Abacus Android App
An Android developers journey of taking ownership of the Abacus Android app, which will hopefully help other Android developers in similar situations.
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Why You Need a Proactive Finance Team
People want answers and they don’t want to wait. Having a proactive finance team is how you answer that demand for data. So how do you make the switch? What do you really get out of it?
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Creating a Vacation Policy For Use, Not Abuse
What to take into consideration when creating your vacation policy, not all of which circles around how much time off employees get.
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Marketing Basic Training: How to Create a Scalable Plan
Create a scalable marketing plan. We’re answering the tough questions – where to start, how to tell if it’s working, and what to do second.
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Maintaining Compliance in Your Finance Software
Maintaining compliance in heavily regulated industries like finance, healthcare and law requires you to be aware of the impact of your data management tool.
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How to Set Goals and Benchmarks to Streamline Finance Data
Improving the accuracy and speed with which your team can produce meaningful insights will hinge on your plan for optimizing the flow of finance data.
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How to Bring Holiday Celebrations to the Office
How do you bring holiday celebrations to the office without ostracizing or upsetting your team? What is appropriate and is not?
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Why We Built Auto-Approval: Speeding Up Your Expense Workflow
We’re excited to announce Auto-Approval, a new Abacus feature. But before getting into the specifics of this feature, I wanted to share some background on the problem we’re trying to solve.
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Abacus Updates: Advanced Team Management Capabilities
At Abacus, we’ve always got our ears open, listening for pain points and challenges that organizations face with expense management. As we have added new features and capabilities, one of our major underlying themes has been speeding up the expense reporting process for both administrators and employees submitting expenses. This past quarter we made a lot of structural… View Article
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6 Core Components of a Scalable Cloud Accounting Stack Strategy
Building your cloud accounting stack is a continuous effort. Once you get the core in place, linking and adding systems comes naturally. The important part about building out any infrastructure of systems and tools is to have a good understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each component, know what will and won’t play nice… View Article
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Stop Killing Your Finance Team’s Agility
The speed at which companies do business has increased dramatically as strategic decisions become informed by real time data. Businesses can access customer and system data instantly, spotting issues, trends and spikes, to make in-the-moment decisions. Adaption to this change has become commonplace in marketing, sales, engineering and customer support; now we’re seeing it shift… View Article
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The State of Cloud Accounting: 2016 Predictions
We’re rounding out our 4 part series on the 2015 state of cloud accounting with a look ahead to 2016. We previously covered the banking, software, and security innovations that happened, but what does each area look like moving forward? While we aren’t claiming to be fortune tellers, we sense exciting changes ahead for the… View Article
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The State of Cloud Accounting – Part 3: Security
Previously in our series, we discussed banking innovation and software updates. In Part 3 of The State of Cloud Accounting, we’re covering the advances in security that happened in 2015 and what they mean heading into next year. According to online accounting technology recommendation service Software Advice’s 2014 industry survey, only 16% of small businesses… View Article
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The State of Cloud Accounting – Part 2: Software Innovations
Following up to The State of Cloud Accounting – Part 1: Innovations in Banking, part 2 of our 4 part blog series focuses on the software innovations that have happened in 2015 and how they are impacting finance teams decisions to migrate to the cloud. The past year has seen a real push of new features,… View Article
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Recap: Abacus Fireside Chat with Alan Federman, VP of Finance at ClassPass
On September 24th, we hosted our first Abacus Fireside Chat (minus the fire!) for New York City finance professionals which featured Alan Federman, VP of Finance at ClassPass (since moved to Kitchensurfing as Head of Finance) as the guest speaker. For those who were unable to attend, we’ve put together a recap of Alan’s talk highlighting… View Article
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The State of Cloud Accounting – Part 1: Innovations in Banking
The past two years have proved to be big years for cloud accounting and fintech, full of innovation and disruption. As 2015 comes to a close, we started to look ahead thinking about what 2016 will have to offer. Our four-part blog series will focus on each area of innovation affecting cloud accounting – banking,… View Article
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Secret Free Tools to Help You Run Your Business
With summer rolling to a close and productivity picking back up at the office, we decided to put together a list of free tools that you may not have heard of to help ease the stress of your workload. Everyone knows how great tools like Slack, Dropbox and Trello are – but there are loads… View Article
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Creative Employee Perks That Small Companies Can Offer
Hiring and keeping top notch employees is challenging, especially for small businesses and startups who don’t have deep pockets. To combat this, smaller companies started offering employee perks like unlimited vacation and removing arbitrary dress codes. However, those perks have started to become expectations and no longer stack up. Companies are going back to the… View Article
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Calculating the Value of Expense Reporting Software
The expense report process is a notorious time-suck, revolving around manual work to submit, review, reimburse, and record expenses. Some tasks have been automated by software and new tools are being continuously developed to lessen the burden. By evaluating your current process, you have the potential to save yourself and company employees from a few… View Article
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The Trick to Smart Modernization of your Construction or Field Service Business
Guest post from Cliff Mitchell at ClockShark There’s a whole new slew of software tools available to your field service or construction company that didn’t exist 10 years ago. By picking the right tools, you’ll provide a better product or service while doing business at a lower cost. You’ll want to revisit it often too, since… View Article
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Relationship Advice for You and Your Outsourced Accountant
As a small business or a startup, it might not make sense to hire an internal finance team, but you might not have the necessary skills to do the books yourself. Bringing on an outsourced accountant is often a logical and necessary step, but don’t be fooled into thinking that you won’t need to put… View Article
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How to Create Your First Company Expense Policy
As a company starts to grow, it becomes more important to have policies in place. Not because you don’t trust your employees – just the opposite actually. Policies help employees understand what is expected of them and leaves them feeling at ease. When you are a small group, you can often communicate these expectations one-on-one,… View Article
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How to Influence 5 Typical Expense Reporting Personalities
Getting employees to fall in line with expense policies can be hard. Partly because it’s always a sensitive subject with a lot of exceptions, but also because everyone has a different expensing personality type. Knowing what kind of expense reporting personalities you have at your company and learning how to keep them on track can have… View Article
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6 Tips for Securing Your Cloud Accounting Stack
The cloud has become the epitome of innovation, drastically improving the efficiency and simplicity of accounting and bookkeeping tasks. Cloud accounting has started to become the standard with tools like QuickBooks Online, Xero, and Zenpayroll. However, more often than not, CFO’s and controllers don’t understand the full extent of security protocols these systems have in… View Article
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Roundup of the Best Small Business Operations Questions in Quora
Quora is a great for community-sourced questions and answers from everything ranging from personal brand preferences to how to run your small business, it can even be a source of creativity and inspiration. But sorting through all of the irrelevant information to get to what you want to know is tedious. So we’ve rounded up… View Article
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Why Feature Parity is the Enemy for Startups
When you’re a startup selling B2B, it’s easy to get distracted by your prospects’ feature checklists during the sales process. It’s not that they’re trying to throw you off – as an objective buyer, it just feels like a logical first step in a genuine apples to apples comparison vs. alternatives. Let’s be clear –… View Article
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5 Chart of Accounts Tips Every Business Owner Needs to Know
Everyone knows that the core reports for accounting are an income statement and balance sheet. But what few people outside of the accounting profession know is how to structure their books to create useful reports. Understanding how to create your chart of accounts is paramount to building your business. So what are the 5 things… View Article
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How Yieldbot Measures the ROI of a Travel and Entertainment Budget
We’re all familiar with the old business adage, “You have to spend money to make money.” While it rings true, there are a lot of ways you can spend money and not all have an equal return on investment. One tried and true way that sales teams have been investing money is by utilizing a… View Article
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5 Required Back Office Upgrades Once You Hit 10 Employees
Something happens when your team hits that double digit mark. You were always a company, but it just feels more real. At the same time, your processes start to break down. The product related processes tend to get quickly realigned, but the back office is usually ignored, while at the same time eating up more… View Article
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Tips for Admins: Getting the Most Out of Abacus
I work with customers to help them optimize their experience in Abacus, especially new admins, and I always want to make sure that they’re discovering 100% of our features. So I’ve pulled together a few pro tips to help you get the most out of your Abacus account.
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How to Boost Employee Retention by Improving Your Onboarding Process
Hiring new employees is competitive, expensive and time consuming, but it’s an investment you make to find the right addition to your team. In order to maximize that investment, part of your employee retention strategy should be simplifying the new hire onboarding process. It’s an immediate way to show you value your new employees time… View Article
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3 Things You Need to Know to Build a Successful Corporate Card Program
Corporate card programs are a powerful way for businesses to take advantage of great benefits like travel discounts and control spend. Different from other business credit cards, corporate card programs require your company meet certain criteria such as a minimum of $4M in revenue and have been in business for 12 months in exchange for… View Article
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Swipeable UITableView Headers – An Open Source Library
Like the pull to refresh gesture, swiping a list item has become de facto standard for ancillary actions. Across iOS, apps support this shortcut for the common application actions to be taken on an item. Abacus was already using swipe to approve individual items, but we wanted to add an “approve all” function to our… View Article
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How to Keep Employees Happy and Healthy
One of our favorite journalists, Cat Clifford from Entrepreneur, wrote two great articles this week on unhappy workers attributing to lost revenue and why business owners should care about their health. We agree that both mental and physical health has a big impact on a company’s bottom line, so we wanted to expand on Cat’s thoughts… View Article
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Why Real Time Expense Reporting Matters for Your Business
The first attempt to improve an old, manual business process typically just moves it online. Nowhere is this more apparent than in expense reporting. Whether you’re still doing it on paper, in a spreadsheet or via an online service, the process is still the same: get your shoebox full of receipts and pour yourself a glass, because… View Article
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Tradition vs. Innovation: What Accounting Can Learn from the Kentucky Derby
This upcoming weekend is the Kentucky Derby, an event rooted in tradition. Big hats, Mint Juleps, and the same 1.25 mile course since 1896. The Run for the Roses is a star studded event with more than 100 years of history, a true symbol of Americana. Although the Kentucky Derby hasn’t changed much, it’s still… View Article
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2015 Will be the Year of Financial Metadata
There has been a steady shift to a data-driven approach to running a business and in 2015, there will be an increase in the demand from departments across the company for granular financial metadata. The rapid adoption of cloud accounting software has started to facilitate the availability of information in a usable format, however, the… View Article
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Debunking the Top 3 Myths of Employee Handbooks
Employee handbooks have gotten a bad rap over the years, being thought of as giant rule books, suppressive and a means for large companies and corporations to cover themselves in case of any problems. This has contributed to the list of reasons that startups and small businesses don’t take the time to create employee handbooks…. View Article
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New Features: Foreign Currency & Attendees
At Abacus, our approach to the expense reporting process is to reshape it from start to finish. The first step was to remove the need for a monthly, batch process report. Our next steps in this journey are to create more usable meta data and to simplify data collection. Following this path, we are excited… View Article
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5 Tips for Balancing Your Small Business with Your Continuing Education
In today’s highly-competitive job market, credentials can make the difference between getting your small business off the ground and starting dead in the water. New business professionals may be able to mitigate a lacking a client portfolio by showing your ability and expertise with an extra certification or an additional degree. If expanding your education,… View Article
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How to Pack Wrinkle-free for a 5 day Business Trip in a Carry-on
No one likes to iron in a hotel room. You’re tired, the iron is old and next thing you know, you end up with a brown iron print on your white shirt. Packing wrinkle-free takes some practice, but it’s well worth the effort. Especially if you can do it while minimizing the suitcase size you… View Article
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Paying Your Employees in Bitcoin – the Pro’s and Con’s
First off, a refresher – what is Bitcoin? It is a decentralized, digital currency that is not controlled or backed by any government or bank (like the Federal Reserve). It is bought and sold in exchanges through a type of bidding process, which sets the exchange rate. The exchange rate fluctuates based on supply and demand… View Article
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How to seal the deal – tips and advice for giving a great product demo
One of the most helpful skills needed for starting a business is learning how to demo your product. The concept is simple, you need to clearly and efficiently demonstrate the problem that your product solves whether it’s with potential investors or buyers. However, to really seal the deal, you need to get the audience to… View Article
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Customer Spotlight: How Shake Is Going Mobile
The team at Shake is building a mobile-first technology platform for simplifying the process of creating, signing and sending legal agreements. Renting out a spare bedroom and thinking of getting a renter’s agreement in place? Buying something off craigslist and want to guarantee some purchase protection? Planning an event and want to execute a contract… View Article
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Changing The Way That Corporate Cards Are Managed
Here at Abacus, our product and community has grown substantially in the past year. In fact, we believe that our community was instrumental for all of our product growth. It’s with their awesome feedback that we continue to build out our service to make sure that Abacus remains the most intuitive and seamless solution for… View Article
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New Feature: Approve Expenses Right From The Lock Screen
Didn’t think we could make it any faster to approve expenses, right? We were pretty excited when Apple announced that App notifications can be interactive. The first thing that came to mind was to put the Approve & Deny actions right into the notification.
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New Feature: Mileage Calculator
For those of you who have to keep track of miles driven in your car for business purposes, we know it can be a pretty painful process. It’s something that you do nearly every day, multiple times a day. When you finally get a chance to sit down and file those mileage expenses, the last… View Article
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3 Apps for Making Your Employees the Most Effective
In today’s world, everyone is a freelancer it seems and more and more work is being handled at off site locations or startup offices launched in basements. Entrepreneurs and their employees may not always have access to resources that the Fortune 500 have when it comes to a steady work schedule. But that’s no reason… View Article
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Leasing New Space? How Much Office Space Will You Need?
So you’re ready to expand your business to a new office, or perhaps you just need to get out of your current location. One of the first questions you’ll need to answer is how much office space does your business need to function at its highest efficiency. Employees need enough room to avoid feeling cramped,… View Article
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Expense Insights right to your Inbox
Now who doesn’t love charts and power rankings? Today we’re turning on a new monthly expense insights email that goes out to all Abacus administrators. It covers some high level metrics for your company’s expense activity as well as some fun stuff like a list of your ‘Fastest Approvers’.
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New Feature: Group Your Expenses by Client and Project Tags
We’re a bit OCD at Abacus HQ. We love keeping things tidy and organized. It’s our aesthetic, we can’t help it. But there was one thing that was irking us. To us, ‘Tags’ were always this helpful feature that let us organize our expenses beyond just Expense Categories. We wanted to Tag our expenses to… View Article
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Two New iPhone App Features: ‘Swipe Between Expenses’ & ‘Receipts Tab’
Managers, remember waking up in cold sweats from those painful years of reviewing dozens of expense reports at month end? When we introduced ’swipe to approve’ in the original Abacus iPhone app, reviewing expenses went from an activity that took hours hunched over your desk to something you could do at your convenience while laying… View Article
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New Feature: Automate Your Expense Policy with Abacus Rule Builder
A lot of companies spend a considerable amount of time managing employee expenses. Much of that is spent communicating and enforcing an expense policy. It’s natural for policies to evolve with a company and begin to cover new categories, geographies, and restrictions. Since change can often be swift and unforeseen, employees file expenses that sometimes… View Article
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Abacus Demo Video
Check out the new Abacus demo video to see how we’re re-inventing the way businesses manage expenses.
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Abacus Raises $3.5M to Eliminate Expense Reports
We began work on Abacus out of a shared frustration with expense reports, setting out to replace them with the first realtime employee expense system. We imagined a service that would make employees happier, while also giving managers more control and better insights. To help us deliver on this mission, we’re excited to announce we… View Article
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A Brief History of Receipts
Imagine if the penalty for not having a receipt was death. Actually, in the ancient world you could be put to death for not paying your taxes. Even if you paid, not having a receipt to prove you did would still end badly for you. Receipts have always been serious business. How serious? Writing itself… View Article
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Airfare Secrets to Save You and Your Employees Cash
We’re all looking for the cheapest airfare out there, and at times it may feel like travel-booking websites are making it unusually hard for customers to find the best deals. There are some airfare secrets, however, that can help you save considerable amounts of money, often in unexpected ways. Below we’ve rounded up some of… View Article
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Standing on Chairs and Other Team Building Exercises
Beyond the hallowed halls of HR departments the term ‘team building’ is often met with eye rolling, head shaking and forced smiles. But what exactly is it that inspires such a reaction? According to the all knowing, all seeing Wikipedia, team building is a “philosophy of job design…” The companies and consultants that provide team… View Article
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10 Ways to Make Your Expense Policy Clear For Everyone
There are good ways and bad ways to handle business expenses. The easy way is to collect all the receipts and let the accountant sort it out. That may be easy for those submitting expenses, but it’s hard on the accountant and hard means time-consuming and costly. The right way is to have a set… View Article
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How to Keep Your Satellite Offices Happy and In the Loop
One of the best problems a business can face is the need to open new offices. You’ve made it! You’ve got multiple locations! But with this great milestone comes the divide between headquarters employees and everyone else. Not to worry. You can preempt the roadblocks that often occur with satellite offices by remembering a few… View Article
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DIY Bookkeeping and Your Accountant
Owning and operating a small business can be a challenge every day, but the day you visit your accountant to have your taxes prepared can easily be the most stressful of the year. The stress is the result of the questions that undoubtedly flood your mind as the appointed day approaches. How much is my… View Article
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Maximizing Your Tax Deductions
There are a several variations of the same question accountants hear from small business clients every tax season; “What do you mean I owe the government money?” Which is usually followed by; “I had more expenses than that!” Accountants are then forced to explain to clients that their hands are tied and they cannot manufacture… View Article
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Moving Up – Is it Time to Hire a Bookkeeper?
Our personal lives are full of easily identifiable milestones like getting married, and having children. Small businesses have milestones that are sometimes not as easy to spot. One such challenge for startups and small businesses is knowing when the time is right to hire skilled financial help like a bookkeeper. Promotional material from software companies… View Article
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Is QuickBooks Online right for my business?
If your small business runs on QuickBooks—including the Pro, Premier and Enterprise Solutions products—you’re in good company. QuickBooks is one of the most popular accounting software packages for small businesses. Today we are here to talk about the other sibling in the QuickBooks family, QuickBooks Online. Many advantages exist in booking your debits and credits… View Article
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The Two Way Street of Employee Expense Reimbursement
Small business owners who reimburse themselves or their employees for business expenses are subject to IRS rules that must be followed or risk financial consequences for both your company and your employee. Having a clear set of internal guidelines can save you and your staff from unwarranted problems such as a hefty tax bill. Your… View Article
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Why it’s a good time for a mid-year tax check-up
Talking about taxes at the end of the summer is about as popular as having your alarm wake you up for work on your day off. It’s just wrong, or is it? Tax accounting is a lot like good comedy, it’s all about the timing. With April 15th long past and the end of the… View Article
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Ditch the Petty Cash Envelope! Use Abacus Instead
Your small business encounters a number of unforeseen incidental expenses: postage costs, deliveries, and parking to name a few. You likely utilize a petty cash system to cover these small, non-recurring expenses, but did you know that using Abacus could eliminate this extra layer of accounting? Below are the biggest benefits from ditching your petty… View Article
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Ask an Accountant: Keeping Business Receipts
Ask an Accountant: “When am I supposed to keep business receipts and when can I get away without them?” by Blake Oliver of Cloudsourced Accounting Unfortunately, in many cases you need to hold on to business-related receipts. In addition to basic recordkeeping, the IRS usually requires supporting documentation for deductible expenses, such as receipts, account… View Article
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Pay Your Contractors the Right Way
So you’ve decided you need another worker, but you don’t want to take on another employee. In many cases, hiring an independent contractor is a great strategy to handle these short-term jobs, but these types of workers come with unique issues to consider, such as the right way to pay your contractors. Below are some… View Article
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New Feature: Now Supporting Multiple Email Addresses
Are you getting a lot of Amazon, Delta, and Uber receipts sent to your personal email address? A new Abacus feature will let you add that address to your Abacus account to make receipt forwarding a breeze. Just go to your Abacus settings and add a linked email account. Stop playing the “Forwarding Game”!
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Expense Inbox getting unwieldy? Now you can apply bulk actions!
We knew that employees would find Abacus really easy to use and that they’d get in the habit of filing expenses in real-time. As administrators, that meant you’d need powerful new tools to filter and act on this expense stream.
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New Abacus Feature: PDF Export
At Abacus, we take your data seriously. We make sure that your receipts and expenses are stored away safely and that you can access them anytime you want via our slick search tools. But we get it, sometimes you want to export everything into an organized document.
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Introducing Expense Rules for Abacus
See what we did there? We’re excited to be rolling out ‘Rules’ for Abacus Administrators. These expense rules are meant to help admins automate their expense policy and customize Abacus the way they need it to work.
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New Abacus Feature: Custom Categories
Didn’t find our default categories expressive enough for your unique business? Well, now you can add your own custom Categories right from your Organization’s Settings (Click on ‘Categories’ to access your list, and find the prompt to add new ones at the bottom).
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Abacus Feature: iOS URL Schemes
As of v1.1 of the Abacus iOS application, you can now launch the app using the custom URL scheme abacus://. Why is this awesome? Imagine you want to expense an Uber ride. Uber could create an ‘Expense with Abacus’ button that would automatically load up the ‘new expense’ screen, pre-filled with the amount, the merchant… View Article
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Security Vulnerability – Heartbleed
You may have heard of the Heartbleed bug — a security vulnerability that affects most of the known internet. On April 7, the OpenSSL project issued a security advisory that detailed this serious encryption software vulnerability. As of 4/9/14 Abacus is no longer vulnerable.
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Fast Company: From An Ex-Googler, An App To Kill Expense Reports
Fast Company: From An Ex-Googler, An App To Kill Expense Reports Turning an irritating administrative chore into something more like personal messaging sounds like a brilliant mind hack… New piece in Fast Company where Ted takes you behind the scenes to reveal some of the insights that went into how Abacus was designed.
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Xero + Abacus = Love
We’re excited to announce the Abacus and Xero integration. Now you can sync your expenses from Abacus right into Xero. We reconcile your expenses and your bank charges automatically, so you don’t have to. We’ll even map your expense categories. Learn more: abacus.com/xero Use Quickbooks? Great! We support Quickbooks Online as well.
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New feature: change your city
By popular request, we’ve added the ability to change your city, so you can select merchants outside your current location. Hopefully this makes your expense entry just a little more enjoyable.
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New Feature: receipts@abacus.com
Email receipts stuck in your inbox? Now you can forward any email (JetBlue receipts, App Store receipts, etc.) to receipts@abacus.com and get reimbursed fast. We’ll match your email address to your account, and turn the email into a PDF. We also handle PDF, JPG, or PNG attachments. www.abacus.com/receipts
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Looking for an accountant?
We’ve pulled together a short list of a few of our favorite accountants, all of whom work with Abacus. West Coast East Coast If you’d like help finding an accountant that’s well-matched to your needs, we’d be happy to help. Email us: hi@abacus.com
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The Abacus Android app is now live in Google Play
Head on over to Play and try it out!
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How We’re Killing Expense Reports
The expense report is broken. The entire concept was a necessity of a previous era when it was simply more cost effective and efficient to process stacks of paper in batch. Today, the secular shift in customer expectations that has fueled market challengers in B2B services like accounting (Xero) and payroll (ZenPayroll) has put pressure… View Article
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Expense Report Hell
Expense report hell – one month on the road. pic.twitter.com/AIW5Rx4F2d — Casey Stegall (@caseystegall) September 3, 2013 We hear ya. With Abacus you can enter expenses on the go, then throw the receipts away. You’ll even get paid back before you make it home.
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New Feature: Track Payout Status
Waiting to get reimbursed? Now we make it easy to track all the payments on their way to you. Log in to Abacus and you’ll see a big blue box with the total amount cash on its way to your bank.
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Hi, we’re Abacus
We’re building the fastest way to create, approve, and get paid for business expenses. We decided to build Abacus because we realized 1. we all had many friends who ran businesses or managed organizations, and 2. we wanted to make better tools for them. We are replacing spreadsheets, paper checks, and ‘reports’ with a 10-second… View Article
