Slack add-ons innovate the platform from outside
There’s quite a buzz about Slack, the popular new workplace communications platform. We covered Slack when it was in beta form back in 2013, and recently celebrated its quick success as well as its potential as a marketing channel. Now innovators are finding ways to make Slack even more useful and multi-functional for work teams.
Birdly for Slack is an add-on that helps teams manage their expenses directly through Slack. It makes your expense management “as easy as a Slack conversation.”
Here’s how it works: upload your expenses from your smartphone or computer into Slack – you can upload documents, such as pdfs of invoices, or you can even use your phone to snap photos of your receipts and upload them into Slack. Add any details or comments as needed. The data is automatically analyzed, and the Birdly bot creates or updates an Excel spreadsheet in real time, and saves the summary in a private Google Sheets folder.
There is no download required for Birdly
It’s simply an add-on that you install once; it then becomes automatically available for your entire team, on whatever devices, be it a tablet, phone, or computer that they use to access Slack.
Birdly seems like a pretty smart robot, but just in case you upload an unusual document or receipt, rest assured that a real human being reviews messages that don’t quite fit the usual process. In this way, an accounting expert is reviewing your expenses to make sure all of the data gets entered correctly.
For you businesses with international clients, Birdly supports expenses in multiple currencies. It can also send you weekly and monthly reminders for expense deadlines.
Birdly represents a growing trend: Slack add-ons
As Slack grows in popularity (they’ve gained 500,000 active users in just one year) to become a common workplace collaboration platform, work teams will be looking to Slack for more than just communications, but to perform a number of different workplace tasks. Birdly seems like a great start to what will likely be a growing trend of add-ons to make Slack more versatile.
