Leading Provider of On Demand HR Services to Provide Expense Management Solution to Client Base

SAN LEANDRO, CA, May 10, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — TriNet, a trusted on demand HR partner to small businesses and entrepreneurs, announced today that it has acquired ExpenseCloud, a leading expense management solution. TriNet will incorporate ExpenseCloud’s offering into its client service platform later in 2012, including adding additional features in job costing, travel management and employee reimbursements.

Los Angeles-based ExpenseCloud will operate as a business unit of TriNet, with its name and brand remaining intact. The ExpenseCloud senior management team, including co-founder and CEO, Eric Sikola, and co-founder and CTO, Dan Fritcher, will remain in leadership positions in the new business unit and will continue focusing on expanding their customer base via the company’s existing business development activities.

“We’re enthusiastic about the acquisition of ExpenseCloud because their industry-leading expense management technology will enable us to provide new valuable services to our clients,” said Burton M. Goldfield, CEO of TriNet. “Small to mid-sized businesses in the TriNet family will soon have access to a powerful tool for efficiently managing their expenses. We’re also thrilled about the unique user acquisition model ExpenseCloud has built, which will create new channels of revenue for TriNet and drive awareness of our best-in-class on demand HR Services.”

ExpenseCloud provides everything companies need to manage the entire expense reporting process online or from a mobile device. The three-year-old, cloud based solution allows users to create, submit, and approve expense reports online and then either reimburse employees or invoice clients via integration with leading SaaS accounting solutions. The system seamlessly connects with many popular online solutions specifically tailored for small to medium size businesses such as FreshBooks, NetSuite, Intacct, and Intuit QuickBooks. ExpenseCloud can also import expenses from thousands of credit cards and bank providers as well as receipt scanning and capture directly from iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry devices.

“We’re excited to join the TriNet family because of their strong reputation for being an invaluable resource to its clients, who will soon gain the ability to manage their expense reporting process online through TriNet’s HR platform,” said Eric Sikola, founder and CEO of ExpenseCloud. “We’re also thrilled about the resources TriNet will bring to bear in order to fuel our growth and accelerate our product roadmap to both existing TriNet customers and companies utilizing other HR platforms.”

“TriNet’s acquisition of ExpenseCloud helps us meet an important business need for the companies we work with,” said Jimmy Franzone, vice president of corporate development of TriNet. “TriNet continues to lead the PEO (professional employer organization) industry in finding innovative ways to provide value to clients. We are dedicated to constantly enhance our service offering as the leading provider of HR outsourcing solutions.”

About TriNet TriNet is a trusted partner to small businesses, providing critical HR-related services on an outsourced basis. TriNet’s solutions help contain costs, minimize employer-related risks and relieve administrative burden to keep an entrepreneur’s focus on core business functions. From employee benefits service and payroll processing to high-level human capital consulting, TriNet’s PEO expertise is integrated with every facet of a client’s business. TriNet specializes in serving fast-moving companies in fields such as technology and financial services, who recognize that top-quality employees are the most critical competitive asset. For more information, please visit http://www.trinet.com .

TriNet, Ambitions Realized and the TriNet logo are registered trademarks of TriNet. All other trademarks, service marks, registered trademarks, or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners.

        Contact:
        Matthew Meigs
        510-875-7320
        matt.meigs@trinet.com

If you want to export data for yourself, go to the Reports > View page. If you want to export data for all company users, go the Reports > Company page (Requires a premium subscription).  Search by sender, data range (new) or report name. You can also filter the reports by their state (Paid, Unpaid, Pending, Rejected, Approved or All). Select the expense reports you want to export and the Export Report link. Choose the format (Report Summary or Report Detail) and the Download CSV button. Your done!

Another cool feature we added is the ability to edit the payment for more than one report. Just select the reports and the Edit Payment button – choose the date, payment methods and any notes associated with them payment.

We’re planning to add more features around the batch export, including new file formats or support for our SaaS integrations.  If you have ideas how this could be used for your business, please ping us at support@expensecloud.com. We’re always looking for feedback! We’ve already seen some companies exporting this data to run more detailed analytics on their company spending habits with other HR or Sales related data. Check out an older post here from GoodData giving an example.

Multi-Currency – We now support sending expense reports entered in the same base currency within ExpenseCloud to Intacct.  Just make sure the base currencies match up between the ExpenseCloud company (subsidiary) and entity your sending the reports too in Intacct. If the report contains additional foreign currencies, ExpenseCloud will take care of the conversion before the report is sent over to Intacct.

Entities – Intacct has a great feature of creating multiple entities that all role up to one global account.  Often, Intacct’s Time and Expense is not subscribed too at the global entity, but at one of the sub-entities. ExpenseCloud now supports the ability to select which entity you want to send the expense reports too and synchronize with (Bills, Expense Types, GL Codes, Employees, etc).  This feature can be enabled when you are adding Intacct as an export option in our Add-On section.

Mileage – ExpenseCloud now includes the number of miles driven in the PAID TO field within Intacct’s Time & Expense.  So if you enter in 10 miles @.55 per mile in ExpenseCloud, it will show up as 5.50 in the amount field of Time & Expense, and the 10 miles will be displayed in the PAID TO field.

Lastly, were considering adding additional export options to Intacct. Right now all reimbursable expense are sent to Time & Expense and all non-reimbursable expenses sent to Accounts Payable as a Bill.  Ideas we are considering are journal entry or integrating with the credit card module. We welcome your feedback or suggestions on what you would like to see here.  Please send us an note at support@expensecloud.com with any ideas.

Another cool feature is the ability to change the route driven.  If Google Maps displays the wrong route taken, you can drag the route line to alternative streets/highways. Once done, a new mileage calculation will appear.

Check out more details on how to set this up here.

Here are the highlights:

• Non – Reimbursable expense are recorded to Accounts Payable as a Bill, under the Vendor you choose (typically the corporate card). Bills can be consolidated and paid. If you included a billable project with the expense, customer invoices can be generated instantly in Intacct.

• Reimbursable expenses are recorded to Time & Expense to pay the employee back via a check or payroll.

• Intacct Projects & Customers can be imported into ExpenseCloud. As the administrator, you can choose which of this data to share with the employees. When an employee creates a new expense, they can add these Intacct Projects and Customer to each expense entry, including marking if they were a billable expense.

We created a video explaining how the new integration works. You can view it here.

• Company Owner – Individual who owns the ExpenseCloud account, including the payment of licenses. Company owners have same permissions as Admin + ownership of ExpenseCloud.

• Admin – Full access to all company settings, users and report. Admins can change company settings like Users, Policies, Categories & more. In addition, Admins have visibility into all company reports & analytics.

• User – Standard user who can submit expense reports

• Bookkeeper – Internal or external bookkeeper / accountant who can has visibility into all company expense reports & analytics, but cannot change company settings.

Let us know what you think and what other roles you would like to see.  Don’t forget to follow us on twitter @expensecloud for all product updates and announcements.

Adding QuickBook Customers / Jobs To Expenses

ExpenseCloud Admins can import all the QuickBooks customers and jobs from our new client-project module. Once imported, every users in the company can access these for each expense line item.  This customer/job data is shown on the expense report and throughout the entire approval process. When the expenses are exported QuickBooks, each entry will include the customer, job and if it was billable.

With the expense data tied to the billable customer and job, companies can instantly create an invoice in QuickBooks, selecting all the expenses incurred for that customer.

Splitting An Expense Report  Based On Reimbursable State

Often times, expense reports contain both reimbursable expenses incurred by the employee and expenses that a company pays from a corporate credit card. Now, ExpenseCloud’s QuickBooks export supports an option to send the data based on the reimbursable state of the expenses within the report. Non-Reimbursable expenses (typically corporate card charges) are sent to QuickBook as a Bill or Check, recorded to the proper Vendor. Reimbursable Expenses can be sent also as a Bill or Check to a QuckBook’s Customer, Vendor or Employee (the common use case is cutting a check to the employee).

Other Additions

• Users can send the expense report as a single QuickBooks entry or a multi-entry based on reimbursable state
• We now display the expenses (Date, Merchant and Amount) when sending via the multi-entry.
• Billable is checked on the expense entry in QuickBooks when selected in the ExpenseCloud expense line item.
• New look to see the report name, submitter, total amount, pre-paid (non-reimbursable) and total due to the employee.
• Support for importing COGS and Fixed Asset categories and mapping them to ExpenseCloud categories.

Taxes can be tracked by individual expense, by expense report or by date range for all users throughout your company. Set up is easy – enter a name, percentage and a description for up to five taxes to be tracked.   If you are the company administrator, any taxes created will be instantly added to every user account associated with the company. Now when an expense is created or imported from a credit card, users just need to associate what tax rate should be assigned to the expense. We even added the ability to select many expenses and assign a tax rate to them. For more details setting up taxes, please see here.

Once taxes are added to an individual or company account, each user will see a summary of the total amount of taxes on their expense report, including a detailed breakdown.

Individuals or company owners can run analytics to view the total amount of taxes incurred by date range.

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @expensecloud

So what is an expense policy?

Very simply put, an expense policy is a set of rules that conforms to the way companies expect their employees to submit an expense report. Easiest example is a “receipt being required for expenses over $25″. A complex example could be “don’t submit a project based expense without marking the billable field, attaching a receipt and filling in the client field”.

Throughout my career, company expense policies were always buried in a 20 page document title “Company Travel & Expense Policy”. Having a piece of paper state the companies expense policy were problematic for both the submitter and the approvers.  The main reason is it’s very difficult to pick up on the mistakes or policy violations in a report without having some automation. Typically, an error or policy violations are identified when the report reaches the accounting dept. (who typically goes through the report with a fine tooth comb). When issues are found, the submitter (who has already spent a great deal of time creating the report and emailing it off) gets notified from accounting that they need to correct the issues and resubmit the report.  Another week of try to get your money back!

Image as the submitter if you could have know upfront what was wrong with the report, only to fix the errors or explain why you went outside the company policy? Or as an approver, being able to view when a company expense policy was not met and possibly providing color into something you may have authorized. Maybe the excuse was legit – while the company expense policy states “no mileage over 200 miles allowed”, one of your employees had a good excuse to drive 300 miles. Maybe they asked ahead of time for permission and it just needs to be noted when the report gets approved.

So to control and manage company expense policies, we’ve added the ability for an administrator to set up the company policies and immediately have them published to every associated user account. To keep it simple, we added two sections: “basic company policies“and “advanced company policies“. In a matter of seconds, an expense policy can be created in our basic company policy section for the following rules:

* Requiring receipt by amount
* Allowed expense age
* Max expensable Amount
* Max mile reimbursable amount
* Cannot submit expenses with the category “unknown”

In our “advanced company policies” section,we kept the super simple feel to create rules for the employees to follow. We allow policies to be create by:

* Billable
* Reimbursable
* Project
* Client
* Category
* Miles
* Receipt
* Integration
* Attendee
* Note
* Amount

Here’s a simple example:

Anytime you are entering a billable expense, a receipt is required.

Here’s a more advanced example:

When the project is Dell, you must mark it billable, receipt should be attached, and amount cannot exceed $199.

We’ve included examples in our help section of advanced company policies for you to view. The post is open to discussion and we encourage others to share with our users how they have set up their expense policies using ExpenseCloud.

Your feedback is very important to us! If you have any suggestions how to improve this new feature or have any success stories (especially how it’s saving your company money!) we would like to know.

Usability enhancements:

• Expenses can be entered in-line now, resulting in quicker entry
• Better error handling, help, and tutorials throughout the site
• PDF receipt images are now viewable without having to download
• Additional credit card / bank import features
• Ability to track paid expense reports
• Re-factored lots of code and improved the speed of the site
• Improved our CSV file import of expenses, including selecting a date format.
• Improved stability for Intuit Workplace customers

Administrative and setup changes:

(probably the biggest area of change – now administrators can setup users from one central console, including controlling global settings for the entire company)

• New company & user setup wizard
• Manage categories, mileage and PDF templates for all users from a single place
• Improved license management – (no more need for users to accept licenses like before)
• Import users from a .CSV file ( support for QuickBooks, Gmail, Google Enterprise Accounts, Outlook, Netsuite)
• Added billing statements for our premium users.

Changes to expense reports:

• New layout for expense reports
• Expense reports now display approval and report history
• Report recall – If you make a mistake you can recall the expense report back to correct it
• Company administrators can now view and take action on any expense report submitted within the company
• Improved search throughout the site
• New CSV export for solutions like MSFT Dynamics, Sage Peachtree and Financial Force

Policy Enforcement:

• Ability to set up individual or company wide expense policies
• Users and approvers are notified when an expense policy is not met within the expense report
• Basic policies can be added instantly: receipt, expense age, maximum amount or mileage and category.
• Advanced polices; ability to setup expense polices based on a number of rules.

Besides this list, we fixed 100′s of little bugs that make the product much better. Over the next few weeks we plan on adding new features like user / company analytics and managing tax rates (VAT).

Please send us a note if you have any feedback, questions or need help at support@expensecloud.com. And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @expensecloud

Thanks,

Eric Sikola
Founder/CEO