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The team behind the mileage tracking app MileIQ, a company Microsoft acquired a few years ago, has released a new application. This time, the focus is not on tracking miles, but rather on spending. The new app, simply called "Spend", arrived on the App Store on Thursday, offering automatic tracking of expenses for work reimbursement or for taxes.
Spend does not seem to be part of some big Microsoft plan to hire spend monitoring giants like Expensify or Concur, for example, owned by SAP. At least not for the moment.
Instead, the application is a Microsoft Garage project, says the App Store.
Microsoft Garage is the company's in-house incubator where employees can test new ideas to see if they have a positive impact on consumers and business users.
Through this program, a number of interesting projects have emerged over the years, such as the dictation tool based on Cortana, Dictate; Sprightly mobile design creation application; abbreviated e-mail application Send; the Word Flow keyboard for smartphones; a Bing-backed alternative to Google News; and dozens of others.
At first glance, the new Spend app looks well designed and easy to use.
Like most expense tracking, it offers features such as the ability to take receipt photos, expense categorization features, and reporting.
However, what makes Spend interesting is the automated tracking and matching of the app, as well as its user interface allowing you to work with your receipts.
The application begins by automatically tracking all your expenses from a credit card or a linked bank account. You can then scan the expenses to mark them as personal or professional. These expenses are automatically ranked and you can add additional tags for an improved organization.
You can also add notes to purchases, split expenses, and customize spend categories, in addition to tags.
In addition, the application can generate expense reports on a weekly, monthly or custom basis, which can be exported as spreadsheets or PDFs. There is a web dashboard for using the application on your computer, but Spend does not appear on the main MileIQ website yet. It does, however, have a support site.
In practice, all of this works well and requires additional testing.
MileIQ had the most profitable application of the Apple App Store for 20 months at the time of its acquisition, in 2015. Microsoft had then announced that the team would work on other mobile productivity solutions.
The company says the new application is an early release and plans to revise it as it improves.
We asked Microsoft for more details about its projects with Spend and we will update it if they have more.
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