Travel much? I do. My job keeps me on the go constantly. A couple of dozen states a year. A dozen countries.
How do I keep track of all the details? My handy dandy trusty MacBook Air never leaves my side. My latest bargain Mac app is one that keeps my itinerary, tracks my expenses and payments, and all the details of where I went, when, and to see whom for what. A reimbursement report is a couple of clicks away. What’s next is a click away.
All for less than the price of a trip to Starbucks.
Track Me, Baby, One More Time!
Here’s the deal. Have Mac, will travel. And travel for business means tracking details, gathering receipts, preparing trip reports, and hoping that the reimbursement matches expectations.
In the past I kept all the expense receipts and details in a big envelope in my briefcase.
I treated it as evidence. All the details got transferred to a spreadsheet, then totaled.
A travel itinerary from online ticket purchases helped, but seldom contained all the details of where I was, what I was doing and when, and where I was going.
Sound familiar?
Enter Trips. It’s an inexpensive Mac app that simply tracks the details of your trip, including itinerary and expenses.
No trip tracking app is worthwhile, regardless of the price, unless it gets used. Click the New Trip button to begin tracking details and setting up an itinerary.
As each trip or leg of a trip is completed, mark it accordingly in Trips.
Trips has specific attributes to match your trips. General, Accommodations, Itinerary, Expenses, and Payments.
Take a look at the details tabs in Trips.
Trips can be categorized into Smart Groups (Home, Meetings, Conferences, etc.).
You Itinerary and Accommodations go hand in hand. Setup the travel steps in Itinerary, along with details in Accommodations, then record the expenses for each in the Expenses tab.
Entering Expenses is a single click operation, and is available from with Accommodations and Itinerary tabs.
The fun begins with Reports. Click to bundle all the details of a specific trip into a table. Total expenses, total payments, and details for each.
All your transportation costs are tracked in detail, including distances traveled. Your trips in Trips have three basic types– Upcoming, Incomplete (in progress), and Completed.
I can pretty much guarantee you that you won’t find a more elegant, comprehensive app at a similar price tag. What’s missing? Some way to auto enter itineraries would be worth more money. That’s still a tedious, time consuming effort.
And, an iPhone version that syncs data with Dropbox. Hey. I can dream, right?
About Jack D. Miller
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