Feature Drop: Expense Reporting

About a month ago, we announced the integration of The Pack Tour and The Pack Pay, enabling seamless contract payments on the platform.

However, we are very aware that this only solves part of the problem…

Crew members also make expenses on tour which need to be reimbursed by the tour manager, artist, or artist manager. Expense tracking is a common pain point for both touring crew and tour managers, and often involves juggling multiple tools from Google Drive or Dropbox folders to excel spreadsheets. And it’s only after this tedious reporting has been done, that expense reimbursements can take place…

Introducing: expense reporting

That is why we are introducing a simple expense management tool in The Pack Tour.
This tool empowers both crew members and tour managers to effortlessly add expenses to crew contracts. You have the flexibility to add expenses manually, or use an automated bulk import.
The manual entry requires filling out a few fields, while bulk uploading receipts leverages OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to extract information automatically, significantly reducing your workload.

🎸Things to try with this new update:

• 🖇️ Bulk upload expense receipts: Our expense reporting tool will automatically record an expense from every receipt you upload, and try to recognize the date, amount and supplier name. You only need to add the context (if required) and the expense category (again, if required).
• 💪 Add expenses manually: If you don’t have a receipt, you can track an expense manually by filling out date, amount, supplier, expense category and context yourself. But probably best to save your receipts, kids!
• 💹 See expense totals on your contract: Once all your expenses are uploaded, the expense totals will be conveniently displayed alongside your contract earnings, providing a comprehensive overview of costs and reimbursements to be done.
• 🤝 Add expenses from both sides of the tour: While it's ideal for crew members to add their own expenses, we understand that tour managers or tour accountants often handle this responsibility on tour. In such cases, the tour manager or tour accountant can easily add expenses to crew contracts on behalf of the crew member.
• 💸 Reimburse expenses: As the person in charge of payments, you can effortlessly reimburse expenses within the contract payment flow. Simply click the "pay" button and provide the necessary details on the payment gateway.
  

With the introduction of expense reporting, The Pack Tour now offers a complete solution for managing all crew-related finances. We are incredibly excited to witness the impact this will have on enhancing financial flows in our industry!
We'll continue to improve our existing features and build new ones that serve the people on and off the road.

➡️ Take a moment to explore the new update, and as always, we highly value your feedback.

💬 And if you've heard anyone in the live music industry express frustration with managing expense reports, please feel free to send them our way!!