Who doesn’t like a good spreadsheet? I’ve been thinking for some time that I wanted to create a spreadsheet to track my travel expenses so that at the end of a trip, I’d know the total cost to the penny for the trip. With my budget travel brand, it’s nice to be able to share the cost with readers to demonstrate that travel really can be affordable.
I tried to create something in Numbers on my Mac and rapidly encountered frustration. Then I thought, am I recreating the wheel? I looked at apps to see if someone had already created just what I needed. Low and behold, Abukai is just what I wanted.
I downloaded the free app on my iPhone. You won’t believe how simple it is. (I am not getting any remuneration for this testimonial!) You simply use the app to take photos of your receipts and if you have an expense without a receipt, you can manually enter that, too. It even accepts receipts in foreign currency. Then at the end of the trip, you hit “process expense report.” That sends you an email with the spreadsheet.
The first time I encountered problems getting the report so I emailed tech support. They responded quickly and efficiently to fix my problem.
Below is a reduced-size copy of the spreadsheet for a two week trip to Utah. I had a total of 50 expenses that I recorded as we incurred the expenditure. The total cost was $2880.63 for gas, food, lodging, etc. That’s about $200 per day which I don’t think is too bad.
I plan to continue to use this app for all future travel to record my expenses and have a report at the end of the trip. How do you keep track of your expenses? Do you have a similar method? I’d love to hear from you.
Based on events in September 2015.
P.S. I’m currently in Mexico with slow internet which hampers my ability to post. See posts from February 2015 for more information on my current location. I’ll let you know how well Abukai handles pesos.
Downloaded the app and will try in for our trip to AZ … thx!
Great! Let me know what you think.