Review: RMR Expenses
Score:
67%
Version Reviewed: 1.0
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Anyone running a business knows that one of the most important things in the world is money. Where it’s coming from, what you’re buying, and (most importantly) how large your expenses are. After all, you need to claim as much back from the Accounts Department as you can – unless you are the Accounts Department, in which case you need to have as perfect a record as possible.
Which is where RMR Expenses comes in. This program allows you to add in your expenses for multiple trips (be it lunchtime meetings with clients or a ten day jaunt to attend a conference in the USA [-you should know all about those, Ewan - Ed]). Within these trips, you can assign your expenses into categories (such as "Food and Drink," "Taxi Fares" and "Evening Entertainment").
If all of this sounds remarkably like a bank accounts program in reverse (with accounts and transaction types) then you’d be right. RMR are the people behind RMR Bank, one of the biggest selling shareware bank account programs on the Internet, over multiple platforms. The database and interface in RMR Bank are very similar to RMR Expenses – which is as it should be. Why re-invent the wheel? Where RMR Expenses scores over RMR Bank is that it’s specifically designed to take care of expenses, and not for managing your portfolio of shares and high interest savings accounts.
Firstly the terminology, menus and interface are all geared to helping you get your expenses down quickly, with a minimum of fuss. Which is good, because if it took 2 minutes to get an entry in, you’d be better off using some scraps of paper. Having your data in electronic form means that you can take into account some of the more useful features of the program. RMR Expenses lets you set up ‘default’ entries that are pre-populated with your own information.
The immediately obvious one is the use of currency conversion. You can define not only your home currency, but also the currency you’re conducting your trip in – for example UK Sterling as the home currency and US Dollars for your trip. At the end of the day, your claim is processed in your home currency, saving you the hassle, and making sure you use the same exchange rate as everyone else.
Another area that thought has been put into is claiming expenses for mileage travelled in a car. RMR Expenses allows you to set up a mileage rate (i.e. how much you can claim per mile) and you can enter a new "journey" entry (as opposed to a standard "expenses" entry) which is automatically converted into the true value.
Finally, once you’re home from a trip, RMR Expenses will take all your expenses for that jaunt and export them to either a plain text file or a CSV one. CSV is probably the most flexible as it can be imported easily into the spreadsheet program of your choice. In any case, the final step, getting the information out of the program, is handled very nicely.
RMR Expenses isn’t without problems, but admittedly these are more down to the OPL runtime still being in beta. Namely it uses a non-proportional font on the device (rather than the nice font on the emulator and in these screenshots) and the dialog boxes are centred on the screen, rather than locked down to the bottom.
But given that these issues are cosmetic rather than functional, RMR Expenses does something that programs should never lose sight of. It does the job it’s designed to do. If you need to keep track of your expenses, it’s a safe bet that you’re going to like RMR Expenses.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at