This month, we revisit our Small Business Card Monitor firms’ online expense reports offerings. Online expense reports continue to be a great service for business card holders, as they can help with filing taxes, setting company-wide budgets and tracking employee spending. Since our last look at online expense reports, we noticed more firms began offering this resourceful feature, while others made enhancements, making the feature more user-friendly and visually appealing.
For this report, we examine two main types of expense reports – standardized and customizable. In terms of standardized reports, the firm generates the reports, with the criteria used in them unable to be adjusted by clients, though the view can be adjusted by clients for some reports. These reports are offered in HTML, PDF or both. The most popular of these reports are Year-End Summary and Quarterly reports. Currently, seven SBCM firms offer Year-End Summary reports and four SBCM firms offer Quarterly Summary reports.
As for customizable reports, the firm designs these reports in a way that clients can alter the report results by adjusting the criteria, such as time period or category. Five SBCMfirms currently offer customizable reports, which are presented in a topic-based format, such as spending by category or spending by merchant. Three of the five SBCM firms require clients to set the criteria before generating a report, while the other two firms allow clients to interactively change the criteria while on the report’s viewing platform. Additionally, three of the five SBCM firms offer a customizable expense report as a part of a larger, multi-faceted tool.
In our investigation, we also discuss related features of online expense reports that maximize their value, such as graphs, download options and help resources. Currently, five SBCM firms offer graphs as part of online expense reports, with four of these firms offering interactive graphs. One firm in particular provides a tool that allows clients to monitor spending patterns and spending history over a four year period through interlinked graphs and transaction table. As for download options, all SBCM firms offer a PDF version of expense reports, with the next most available download option being Excel. Lastly, six SBCM firms offer some type of assistance for clients viewing online expense reports, such as by providing Help links or FAQs.
