A New Year's Resolution: Get those expenses in on time!

©1994, The Boston Globe

In keeping with the impulse for self-improvement that pushes to the fore at the turn of the year, I've settled on a resolution that should benefit both my bosses and me.

I'm one of those people who just never seems to get his expense accounts in on time. In fact, I may hold some sort of record for letting my employer hold money that is rightfully mine, while I fight off the credit card companies who want theirs from me, whether or not I get mine back.

There's no good reason for this.

With absolute certainty, I can say it costs me money to drag my feet because the longer I go without writing down the things I did for the company, the more I forget when it comes time to seek reimbursement. And every school child past about grade four knows I'm sacrificing interest my money could be earning for me if it were in my bank account instead of accumulating in company coffers.

It's just that somehow there never seems to be a convenient time to gather all those receipts and notes I've scribbled to myself, sort them by date, get out the calculator and the bright yellow form and start the laborious process of filling in the blanks. Inevitably, I'm interrupted, or the stack of receipts tumbles off my tray-table on the plane and I have to start all over again.

Not anymore.

I've got QuickXpense by Portable Software.

There are several products on the market these days that purport to help people track their expenses. I tried Expense It! and Xpense-Pro and hardly got past go with either one. But QuickXpense, developed by Portable Software Corp. of Bellevue, Wash., is what I've been waiting for.

If you can load Windows on your computer and keep even a rough record of the checks you write, you can do expense accounts with this program.

When you first start it up, QuickXpense conducts a brief interview to determine what information it needs to collect from you each time, whether you must make foreign currency conversions frequently or only now and then and how often you are required to file (I said I didn't know, even though our form says reports are required "within one week of expenditure".).

If your company, like mine, has its own form and insists that everyone use it, the people at Portable Software will create a computerized facsimile for you -- if they haven't already done it for someone who works for the same employer. There is a growing list of corporate forms available for downloading from the QuickXpense bulletin board or via Compuserve (Go Xpense).

People who work for a Fortune 1,000 company can get the form done free; for others, there is a $50 charge until Jan. 31, when the fee will double. Buy two or more copies -- at about $60 each from computer stores -- and Portable Software will produce the forms free.

I must confess the software isn't perfect. My company's forms leave only a tiny space for describing what you did with the money, and QuickXpense couldn't be altered to scribble little notes in the margins, as reporters do when they run out of room in the space provided. The software developer offered to redesign the form a bit to make it work.

Once it's running, QuickXpense is a breeze. Enter each item, in any order. It will sort by date -- and create expense accounts for as many reporting periods as necessary. Select an expense category by typing one or two letters, and the program will fill in the rest.

It keeps a list of restaurants you frequent and contacts you entertain and is smart enough to remember you usually pay for taxis with cash and meals with American Express. Oh yes, it does all the math and keeps a running total in a little window in the corner of the screen showing how much the company owes you.

When you're finished, QuickXpense will print your expense account ready for signing or, if you work for a company that has automated the process, you can file your report by e-mail, stick the receipts in an envelope and send them along later.

Almost as impressive as the product is Portable Software's sense of corporate responsibility. Several early users of QuickXpense, including this one, lost some expense files because of a technical glitch that can occur if you crash or turn off your machine without properly exiting Windows.

When the company learned of the problem, it changed its own program to safeguard against the weakness in Windows and sent the new version to all registered users, telling them about the glitch and urging them to install the fix. Perhaps there's a lesson to be learned here.

--The Boston Globe, December 30, 1994