The other expense apps are impressive. Sometimes you just need one that works.

I want to say something plainly, because most product sites will not: the other expense apps are good. Some of them are genuinely impressive. They have been at it for years, they have big teams, and they offer a ton of features. Corporate cards, travel booking, approval chains that go five managers deep, integrations with everything. If you need all of that, you should probably use one of them, and I will not pretend otherwise.

I tried several. I am required to file an expense report every week, so I had a real reason to. And what I kept finding was that the feature count did not help me on Friday. I still had receipts in three places and a mileage log I was rebuilding from odometer photos. The report still had to be forced into a workbook my company had used for years. The apps could do a great many things. They could not do the small, specific thing my week needed, which is why I was still doing it by hand.

Sometimes you just need something that works. Something that is easy to set up, easy to use, and made by people who will change it to fit you instead of asking you to fit it. That is what we built. It scans the receipt and remembers your corrections. It knows the places you drive to. It puts the week into your exact workbook, formatting and all. It connects to your books, and if it does not connect to yours yet, we will usually build that at little or no cost. That is the whole pitch. It is not a long one.

A word about who built it, since "founder" on the why page might read as one person in a spare room. I am the founder, and the app exists because of my Fridays. But behind me is a team of enterprise developers whose day jobs are at companies you would recognize, and who have reviewed, built and helped design every part of this. I do not put their employers on a website, and they would not want me to. What I can say is that the app was built to a standard set by people who build software for very large companies, and then made simple enough for a team of five.

What we set out to build was something simple but powerful, easy and intuitive to use, and honest about what it does. I think we have gotten pretty close. If you try it and you think we have not, tell me exactly where; that is how it got this far.

Max Duerr, founder, Second Horizon. Little Rock, Arkansas.