.KEYWORD expense
.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE How to produce better expense reports
.OTHER
.SUMMARY PalmPower contributing editor Jeff Carlson has found what we’ve all needed for a long time. If you’ve ever needed to capture and report expenses in the hopes of getting an expense reimbursement, you should check out this review. Jeff looks at Palm Expense Creator from Shana. This handy little program doesn’t replace your Expense application on the Palm device. Rather, it provides a whole host of reporting options you can use from your PC and, yes, your Macintosh.
.AUTHOR Jeff Carlson
Does the Palm platform have a "killer app"? In the computer industry, it’s usually a handful of applications that make a machine or operating system compelling in a "must-have-or-perish" sense. For most PCs, it was word processors and spreadsheet programs; the early success of the Mac was due in large part to PageMaker, laser printers, and desktop publishing.
But in the Palm world, killer apps seem to be defined on a case-by-case basis, depending on how each person uses his or her organizer. Some people, for example, build symbiotic relationships with Date Book (or advanced alternatives such as DateBk3), and completely ignore the Memo Pad or To Do List. If your work demands that you accurately track expenses, the included Expense program should be your killer app, but really isn’t. The included reporting macros for the Expense program, by many standards, is pretty sub-standard.
Palm Expense Creator from Shana Corporation is a Macintosh and Windows expense solution that just might take some of the edge off that sentiment. Windows users who don’t own Microsoft Excel (which is required in order to use the Palm Desktop’s built-in Expense macros), or Macintosh users who may have forgotten that Expense even exists due to the previous lack of support on the Palm Desktop, will find Expense Creator a good alternative for quick and easy form generation.
The key idea is that Palm Expense Creator doesn’t replace your Palm device’s Expense Application. You still use the same program on your device. What it does is provide a reporting alternative to the Excel macros provided with the Palm Desktop.
.H1 Painless expense reporting
Palm Expense Creator is actually a component based on Shana’s Informed Designer family of products. In this case, it’s based on Informed Filler. A fully-functional "Basic" (as in entry-level features, not based on the Basic language) version is available free from the Shana Web site. It’s also included with the new Palm MacPac software. For many people, the Basic version is likely good enough for common expense reporting. Seven report templates are included: five standard layouts plus two geared toward enterprise customers.
Using the same Palm Expense Creator installer file, you can optionally install the Advanced version, which requires a $25 activation key that works for up to five users. Advanced users can take advantage of 18 standard and two enterprise layouts, each of which can be displayed in Classic, Modern, and Swing styles. There are also options for adding your company’s logo to the form, as well as support for tax handling, email delivery of completed form data, digital signatures, and summarizing your expense information.
When you install the Macintosh version, a new conduit is placed in your Conduits folder. The new conduit reads the expense data from your handheld and formats it into a text file in your user folder. The Windows version doesn’t require a new conduit, relying instead on the file created by Palm’s existing expense conduit.
.H1 Setting up expenses
In line with the Palm philosophy of simplicity, setting up Palm Expense Creator’s options is speedy and straightforward. Launching the program presents you with the main expense creation screen, shown in Figure A.
.FIGPAIR A Once you’ve set up your preferences, this is the only screen you should ever deal with to create new reports.
Click the Setup button to display a second row of buttons. Your most important step is to identify the location of your user folder. From there, use the top row of buttons, shown in Figure B, to cycle through the setup screens, inputting your personal and company information, and adding specifics such as the mileage reimbursement rate and currency conversion amounts. If you’re using the Advanced version, this is also where you can add an illustration or company logo (as long as it’s under 32K in size).
.FIGPAIR B Get personal with your reports! The top row of buttons lets you customize how reports are generated.
If your expenses are subject to tax, you have some flexibility in the way the information is presented. Actual amounts need to be expressed in decimal format (such as 0.04 for 4 percent), but you can customize the label that describes it. Let’s suppose, for example, that your state has enacted a 43.2 percent tax to renovate sidewalks and nature trails. You would enter 0.432 in the Tax Rate field, then have the flexibility to write "Cracks/Tracks Tax" in the Tax Label field.
The last step before generating a report is to choose a template that represents the best way to display your data. Click the Select Template button and choose from the pre-built templates available on the Choose Template popup menu. It may take a few attempts to determine the one for you. Fortunately, you can click the Preview button to get a thumbnail image and description of the form’s purpose.
.H1 Reporting for duty
When all the basics have been laid down, you’re only a couple of clicks away from owning a completed expense form. Select a category, a start date, and an end date. Then click the Create Expense Form button. A new window will appear with your expenses organized according to that template, as shown in Figure C.
.FIGPAIR C The finished product, or at least one of several. The templates included with Palm Expense Creator often highlight different data.
If you have a large number of expense records, there may be a delay while the data is being processed, but otherwise, that’s it. If you discover that another template might display more information that’s important to you, just close the window without saving changes and change the preferences in the Select Template screen. Then, click the Create Expense Form button again to create a new report.
With the report on screen, you can click on any cell to edit its contents. Changes are automatically updated throughout the form. This includes adding new records (in case you just found a receipt in your coat pocket but don’t want to start over from scratch, for example). If you need to do further tweaking and editing, take a quick tour of the menu items that appear when a report is active. Records can be sorted, memorized, reverted, or tagged.
You can also use this as a basic expense reimbursement tracking tool. A Status popup menu will let you specify whether the form has been Not Yet Submitted, Submitted, or Paid.
.H1 Signed, sealed, delivered
If you’re accustomed to creating handwritten expense reports, your fingers may be twitching in anticipation of putting down your pen once and for all. You now have a sharply formatted report based on the data you diligently collected. Perhaps it’s time to sit back and congratulate yourself.
Or perhaps it’s time to start sleeping on the sidewalk. We are, after all, talking about money here. If that report doesn’t reach the accounting department or the client who’ll be reimbursing you, everything you’ve done up to this point becomes just a technical exercise. Palm Expense Creator gives you several options for delivering your important data.
The easiest and most traditional method is to print and send the reports. If you need to print expenses on preformatted pages, the program’s preferences give you the ability to print the data without the formatting, plus control the offset adjustment of the printed image to improve the layout.
However, this still doesn’t account for that guy in the mailroom whose bike you accidentally crushed under your car’s tires last week, and who seems to be "accidentally" shredding all of your outgoing letters. If you’re not comfortable sending the report by regular mail, Expense Creator includes the built-in functionality to send it by email. And if you’re still worried that some nefarious person might intercept your email, there are options for including digital signatures using the Entrust or I-Sign services. Double-clicking the signature fields, as shown in Figure D, lets you add a digital signature, ensuring that the data is really from you.
.FIGPAIR D Double-clicking the signature fields lets you add a digital signature, ensuring that the data is really from you.
There are also a variety of options for exporting and saving the data. You can customize the default method of exporting to create a tab-delimited text file that includes only the fields and information you need in any order. Choosing Save As from the File menu gives you a choice of saving to Informed’s file formats, or as a PDF file or TIFF image file.
.PAGE
.H1 Creating killer expense reports
Palm Expense Creator at first seemed like a great little one-shot utility, especially for Mac users who have never had an option for exporting their Expense application data. But after using it to generate a few month’s worth of expenses, you’ll realize that a killer application doesn’t have to be a killer in terms of time and hassle. This is a nice, helpful little program.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
Palm Expense Creator is available from Shana Corporation at http://www.shana.com.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
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