Abacus Labs: Real-Time Expense Management

With the simple idea of making reimbursements simple for organizations as well as employees, Omar, Power, and Josh Halickman founded Abacus Labs in 2013. By replacing expense reports with a real time expense management system, Abacus assists businesses to provide finance teams with the tools and data that enable them to become a strategic pillar in their organization.

Employees can submit transactions by snapping a picture of the expense receipt with Abacus’ iOS or Android app or by adding a credit card slip. The expenses incurred can be then approved by the managers immediately which are synced to cloud-based accounting software like Quickbooks Online or Xero. Further, the Abacus solution deposits the reimbursements each night into employees’ bank accounts automatically. Thus, the tedium of inputting individual expenses into payroll software or making separate checks can be avoided.

In addition, the previous expense reports are taken into consideration by Abacus and this data is used to program expense policies into the software to automatically approve certain expenses. “Imagine, as an employee, that instead of having to manually submit expense reports, Abacus could take all the sources of data—receipts from emails, your CRM data, your corporate and personal credit cards—and use that, as well as previous expensing behavior, to suggest pre-completed expenses,” elaborates Omar Qari, Co-Founder and CEO of Abacus.