Wheelings & Dealings: Abacus Receives $3.5M to Eliminate Expense Reporting
November 03, 2014
By Michael Guta, TMCnet Contributing Writer
The first appearance of the abacus was seen in Mesopotamia during 2700–2300 BC with the Samarian version of this device, which was invented before the adoption of the written modern numeral system. Fast forward almost five millennia later, and it is still in use by merchants in different regions around the world. The sexagesimal number system of the abacus simplified the way merchants perform their accounting and with each successive technology new methodologies were introduced to make the accounting process even more efficient. However, expense reporting is still with us, a time-consuming and tedious process many businesses and individual businessmen would rather do away with. Abacus, a company whose inception was based on how expense reporting would have worked if it had been born mobile, has created an application with the first real-time employee expense system. This innovative solution has many investors looking to capitalize on its potential, and the company announced it has raised $3.5 million in new funding to increase its presence.
As any member of an organization can attest, expense reports are a necessary evil that have to be carried out each and every month, or the specified timeframe set by the company. The beauty of the Abacus system is it performs all the functions by just taking pictures of the necessary documents and it proceeds to geo-tag (News - Alert) the entries, get expenses into the system as they are incurred, link credit cards to input purchases into the expense account, connect managers so they can contact employees to verify information, and last but not least managers can approve expenses immediately instead of waiting at the end of the month by syncing with the company’s accounting software and making automatic payments to the employee’s bank account.
Abacus offers the service for five dollars per month per user, but it is offering the service for free to organizations that process fewer than 10 expense reports per month.
The company was founded by Omar Qari, Ted Power and Joshua Halickman in 2013, and it currently has more than 150 customers including Pinterest, Foursquare (News - Alert), Coinbase and Betterment.
Abacus announced on its blog that this round of funding was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and General Catalyst; with participation from Bloodstone; CrunchFund; FundersClub; Google Ventures; Homebrew; Sherpalo; Patrick and John Collison of Stripe Josh Reeves of ZenPayroll; Jeff Epstein, former CFO of Oracle (News - Alert) and DoubleClick; Naval Ravikant of AngelList; Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail of Venmo; Adam Erlebacher of Simple; Sumon Sadhu of Quid; and Nas and Paul Buchheit of Y Combinator.
Edited by Maurice Nagle