Birdly launches a Slack bot for Expense Management
Who needs an app anyway?
Birdly was created for a sole purpose: beating administrative phobia, and today we’re launching a new product that should bring us one step further in this fight.
But what’s administrative phobia exactly?
The term was first coined when a French politician “forgot” to pay his taxes, and said he was afraid of doing his administrative tasks. We like this notion because a lot of people of our generation feel the same way. Not that they aren’t paying their taxes, but they slack off on doing them.
For a year now, we’ve been hard at work finding ways to make life easier for employees and CFOs around the world. And the first pain we wanted to tackle was one many of you know, the one of filing expense reports.
When we created Birdly, we were 25-year-olds, with only a small experience in the professional life, but whatever the industry we worked in at the time, we faced the same problem. Losing half a day each month just gathering receipts, opening Excel and adding expenses manually, line by line, filling names, projects, categories, amounts, taxes, dates… You can imagine how annoying this is, when you have better things to do.
We told ourselves we must not be the only ones annoyed and willing to spend time on things that matter .
We launched Birdly on the French market a few weeks after figuring this out. A mobile app with a simple functioning: snap a picture of your receipt, let the data be recognized automagically, and click on “Export” to get your Excel recap and a zip of your receipts.
The app is fine, but we felt like we could go even further in facilitating the life of people.
A mobile app takes room in your phone.
A mobile app doesn’t handle digital expenses.
A mobile app has to be downloaded and installed for all employees.
A mobile app necessitates that you sign-up.
A mobile app is lost in the clutter of the other apps you don’t use.
But who needs an app anyway?
Recently, you might have seen a whole set of new apps, some refer to as “invisible apps” (like Ryan Hoover from Product Hunt). Apps with no interface, taking advantage of messaging channels to deliver value.
Some of them use SMS, some other use Messenger. We chose Slack.
We chose Slack because the whole company is already there. We chose it because you can integrate other services easily, once and for all people in the team. We chose it because it’s well designed and they have a wonderful retention rate. We chose it because we use it a lot at Birdly. We chose it because we bet on its future.
We created the first bot that manages your expenses, directly on Slack.
Discover Birdly for Slack
People send their receipt to our half-human, half-bot integration and we recognize the data automatically, before sending them a link to their personal spreadsheet.
We have been beta testing it during the last two months with 70 wonderful teams, from 2 to 100 people inside each. Instead of taking one afternoon/month, it takes them around 20 seconds per expense.
Send your receipt to our Slack bot:
Let the data be recognized automatically by our bot. And get a link to your personal Spreadsheet.
Whether you’re working at a small or a medium business, stop wasting time on your expense reports and start letting the data of all your receipts or invoices be automagically recognized.
We hope you see you on board!
