ABUKAI, a vendor that focuses on what it refers to as actionable business productivity, announced this morning its next-generation ABUKAI Expenses 2.0, a very interesting mobile receipt scanning service. With ABUKAI Expenses, capturing and recording expenses is greatly simplified and reduced to an easy two-step process:

• Users will take pictures of their receipts, while on the road or in the office, simply by using their smartphones.
• When finished capturing all relevant and related receipts, users then simply click on “Submit” in the application and ABUKAI converts the receipts auto-magically into a finished expense report.

For those among us who have long hated those much dreaded “doing expense reports” days – well, there may very well be a way to ease your pain. ABUKAI Expenses users never need to actually key information into their mobile devices or computers. Rather, ABUKAI automatically creates the expense reports, provides cost categorization, date, vendor and any other required information - already filled in and ready to submit. ABUKAI will also automatically handle currency conversion.

Once an expense report is created it is sent via e-mail to a designated user e-mail address along with a PDF document with copies of the receipt images for the expenses in that report. For corporate account customers, ABUKAI also offers several options to input expense data directly into existing expense management or accounting systems accommodating many of the data formats most commonly used for that purpose.

With the new release that was announced today ABUKAI users will be able to take advantage of an enhanced experience, built around such new features such as:

• Electronic images of receipts that look just like paper copies from a copier, using ABUKAI's patent-pending real-time receipt look.
• Real-time preview that shows how receipts will appear.
• Black and white receipt copies that enable faster uploads, smaller reports (also for import into other systems with memory limitations) and easy printing.

In addition, this next-generation of ABUKAI’s technology will automatically rotate receipt sizes in reports based on actual receipts (full page vs. smaller receipts).

ABUKAI supports iOS/iPhone, Android and BlackBerry (News - Alert). New features in the just-released version include the following:

• New revised user interface with cool graphics and a friendly look and feel.
• Receipt view to double check and review receipts.
• The ability to select frequent terms from a list of terms such as project codes, clients, or attendees for a meal.
• The ability to turn on multiactivity reporting, out of pocket and monthly reporting features through the User Portal or through the Corporate Portal in case of standard corporate accounts.
• The ability to post expenses directly to corporate systems, link ABUKAI to accounting and expense systems, such as Insperity ExpensAble, Intuit (News - Alert) QuickBooks, Xero Accounting, and many others, directly through the User Portal.
• In-app form to request additional customization from ABUKAI.
• Push notifications on completion of expense report processing.
• Support for App URL for third party applications to launch ABUKAI.

There are three types of accounts that users can set up. With the new release ABUKAI has added a new “freemium-pricing model” that includes 12 expense report submissions per year for every user (counted as sets of 10 receipts). ABUKAI now also offers an unlimited, single-user account for $99 per year. These are certainly excellent services for prosumers, consultants and independent users. Very small businesses can also take advantage of these capabilities.

But, perhaps the most valuable service is for companies and departments within companies with slightly larger employee bases to provide ABUKAI as a corporate service. For these scenarios ABUKAI offers a standard corporate account at $49 set-up and $99 per user per year, which includes access to ABUKAI’s Corporate Account Portal, which allows departments or companies to manage multi-user accounts. Where special or additional customizations are required, ABUKAI is easily able to custom tailor corporate accounts based on any given company’s requirements.

Download and setup is quite easy. It is all done directly through the company’s website, and with the freemium model now available anyone can quickly check out just how much they will hate doing expense reports without ABUKAI. Definitely check it out.