Microsoft Looks for iPhone Users to Help Test a new Expense-tracking App Codenamed Project Phoenix

[RaduTyrsina]

Apple has managed to make quite some waves with its new Apple Pay payment systems and now its rivals are trying to come up with similar products. According to a Facebook posting, Microsoft is inviting testers with iOS devices to sign up for an early preview of its "Phoenix" expense-tracking application. And while that isn't exactly a payments processor, it might suggest that the company is working on something bigger:

Here's what the company said:

The phoenix team at Microsoft began with a simple realization: nobody likes filing expense reports.

Each of us has a powerful computer sitting in our pocket when we take business trips. Given this, one would think that the tedium of filing expenses would have been solved.

Yet, most of us know that from the perspective of one filing expenses, little has improved since the linked corporate credit card was introduced many years ago.

We talked with hundreds of frequent business travelers to learn more about this problem and understand what it's like to deal with expenses when you're on the road all the time.

We took all of our learnings and created the vision of Phoenix: a mobile app that uses all the smarts we can gather to automatically fill out your expenses for you. By giving you a notification of credit card spend in real time, we let you glance at at the expense, approve it, and be done.

Today, our first cut of Phoenix is alive. It's still early - we've got a long way to go to bring this vision to life - but we're now ready to invite a few individuals to join us on our mission to slay the expense report beast! Are you in?

Phoenix is an "experimental" app that's part of Microsoft's Garage incubation program. The expense-reporting app is integrated with contacts mentioned in users' Outlook calendars, so it could prove to be helpful to you if you use Microsoft's services.

Source: Project Phoenix