Captio is an Android app that wants to make logging and keeping track of business expenses with your smartphone a lot easier. The main point to support this is the automatic expense scanning, Captio claims to automatically extract the data from the receipts and invoices that you capture with your smartphone. Though Captio usually works like a whole solution where expense reporters are connected to their supervisors under a single corporative environment, they offer a stand-alone version for freelancers which we tested.
Just like other Android apps, users will need to download Captio from the Play Store, and then get started with the app. users are given the opportunity to either log in or create an account, which is something that new users will of course need to do.
The main menu gives users of Captio a look at all of the different options that they need to interact with in order to file their expenses. While this certainly doesn’t look all that pretty, it’s fairly straightforward and easy to understand, which is nice.
Here, users can easily go ahead and start a new ticket, such as a mileage expense. This is a little annoying, as the only way to change the unit of expenses paid is using the web application. Captio is meant for business environments, where an administrator should set this kind of variables for all the users.
There’s no option in the app to change anything other than the amount of miles, or we should say kilometers here. Well, in every expense you can go ahead and choose the date, but you cannot choose a date that’s in the future, which means you can’t pre-empt an amount due to leave your account the following Monday, for example.
One of the main attractions of Captio however, is the fact that you can create an expense from a photo of a receipt, Captio will automatically extract the information required to create your expense reports (provider, amount, date) You can, of course, add any other information manually.
Users can change the currency of the expense, add some remarks as well as choose the type of expense, but there doesn’t appear to be that many categories overall. When I questioned Captio about that, their response was that categories can be customized through the administrator web app.
While I would have liked to see more categories here from a personal user point of view, businesses (which is what Captio is ultimately designed for) can control their own categories from the web app, tailoring the overall experience to their employees. Reports can be run to simply work out how much you’ve spent on fuel or purchases and while these take a little while to generate they can be very helpful for a business working out their overall expenses quickly.
These reports are designed for users that put in high volumes of expenses and then need to send them over to their superiors or their accounts department, and for those sort of users, it seems to work quite well. One thing that was slowing me down was that the receipts from a photo seemed to take a long time to be worked through by the Captio Cloud Servers. It seems that the information extraction takes some time.
However, we suppose that Captio must be doing quite a bit of work in the background to get all of the info out of the photo.
It appears as though there’s a lot that Captio has to offer, but the problem is just being able to harness it all, admittedly I’ve only used it for test receipts and expenses, which is where another of my problems appears from. That’s because Captio is best used as a corporate tool for small or large businesses to manage expenses from a number of employees. The Android app is basically a way for individual users to quickly and simply record their expenses to make life easier for everyone involved. There’s a lot of potential here with Captio, and all it really needs is some more polish and many more options to give users more choice when logging their expenses and it will be an app that would be easily-recommended to a lot more users. With an easily-understood interface and simple options, Captio is easy to pick up and use right away, but for those that know what they want from an expenses app and aren’t happy to wait, Captio could feel a little limited.
Ratings
- Speed (4/5) – Everything runs nice and smoothly in Captio, and it’s quick and easy to log any sort of expense the app can handle.
- Features (4/5) – Captio is certainly nice and easy to use, and the customizable categories for expenses allows businesses to tailor their overall experience and Captio offers users powerful report tools to keep check of things.
- Theme (4/5) – It might not be the prettiest of apps out there, but it’s easily-understood and straightforward in terms of usage and it’s far from unoffensive in terms of looks.
- Overall (3.5/5) – Captio is a great concept and one that has a lot going for it, but it’s the sort of thing that needs more options for users and needs to more flexible when choosing categories and units.
Pros
- Works well on practically any Android device out there thanks to a straightforward and logical interface.
- Makes good use of the camera on your smartphone to quickly and easily throw out the paper from receipts or invoices.
- Makes logging mileage reports nice and simple no matter how far the trip.
- Backs up all receipts and such taken with Captio to the cloud so that nothing is lost online.
Cons
- Doesn’t give users enough options when filing mileage reports.
All-in-all, Captio is an app that some will find really easy to use and straightforward, but others might find lacking in terms of options and such. With great features like the cloud backup and the ability to just take a photo of a receipt however, there’s a lot on offer here. With some extra polish and some more options for categories and such, Captio can become a real winner.