One of the things I hate wasting time on is compiling expense reports. Ideally, I would like to report expenses as they get made, using my cellphone and a streamlined user interface that would work both online and offline. A simple email client and the appropriate online service might be all that is needed for building such a time saver.

Reporting expenses on the field in real time requires a very simple user interface. It should be possible to do it while standing up, using one hand only while the other is holding a receipt, and it should not take more than 30 seconds.

An email client is a great interface for such data entry, because it is available from virtually any mobile device today and can work either online or offline — when you’re offline, sent emails are buffered until the device gets back online. In order to use it for expense reporting, a simple gateway could be used to parse received emails and store expenses into a database that could also be accessed from a web interface, such as Dabble DB or Salesforce.com. With such a service, reporting a $12.60 meal (accomodation, abbreviated “ac”), would be as simple as sending the following email to expense@yourdomain.com:

ac $12.60

Standardizing on a set of two-letter abbreviations for the types of expenses and using standard currency symbol would allow the system to capture the expense’s type, amount, date (assuming that the expense was reported the same day), and originator (using the sender’s email address as identifier). Of course, the format could be extended in order to accomodate specific reporting requirements.

Now, what should I use to build such a thing?