Microsoft’s new expense tracker Spend hits the App Store

The team behind the mileage tracking application MileIQ, a company that Microsoft acquired a few years ago, comes out with a new application. This time, the focus is not on tracking miles, but on spending. The new application, called simply "Spend," came to the app store on Thursday, and offers automatic tracking of expenses for labor reimbursements or taxes.

The expense does not seem to be part of a big plan by Microsoft to take on the giants of the expense tracking industry, like Expensify or Concur, owned by SAP, for example. At least, not at this time.

Instead, the application is a Microsoft Garage project, clarifies the App Store.

Microsoft Garage is the company's internal incubator when employees can try new ideas to see if they agree with consumers. and business users.

Through the program, several interesting projects have had their beginning over the years, such as the dictation tool based on Cortana, Dictate; Sprightly mobile design creation application; Short form email application Send; the Word Flow keyboard for smartphones; an alternative backed by Bing to Google News; and dozens more.

The new Spend application, at first glance, seems well designed and easy to use.

Like most expense trackers, it offers functions such as the ability to take photos of receipts, expense categorization features and

However, what makes Spend interesting is the automated tracking and comparison of the application, and its user interface to work with your receipts.

The application starts by automatically tracking all your expenses from a Credit card or bank account link. You can then slide the expenses to mark them as personal or business. These expenses are automatically sorted and you can add additional labels for the aggregate organization.

You can also add notes to purchases, split expenses, and customize expense categories, plus labels.

Y The application can generate expense reports on weekly, monthly or customized bases, which can be exported to spreadsheets or PDFs. There is a web control panel for when you are using the application on your computer, but Spend does not appear on the main MileIQ website at this time. However, it has a support site.

In practice, everything that works, in practice, requires more tests.

MileIQ has been the financial application with the highest revenue in the Apple App Store during the last 20 months at the time of its acquisition in 2015. Microsoft had said that the team would work on other mobile productivity solutions in the future.

Since joining Microsoft, the team that created MileIQ has added capabilities to MileIQ, such as MileIQ for Teams, New Intelligence Features, and a partnership with Xero. MileIQ is now also included with the Microsoft 365 Business and Office 365 Business Premium plans

However, Spend is the first standalone application created by the team at that time.

The company says the new Spend application is an early version, and they plan to revise it in the future as they make improvements.

Microsoft responded to a request for comments, but did not provide any details about its eventual plans for the expense, for example, whether it will have a business model or be included in the Office subscriptions. .

10/19/18: Updated after publication with information about Microsoft comments.

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