The Jot iPhone App From Chase Ink Credit Card is a Winner
Like countless owners of small part-time businesses, I struggle with the task of expense-tracking. For the first couple of years, I paid for things I needed for my business with my personal credit card and threw business-related receipts into a large envelope. I only spent time (lots of time) organizing things when I had to prepare my tax return. As my business and accounting headaches grew, it dawned on me that it would be smart to get a separate credit card to use just for my business expenses (Doh!). I chose the Chase Ink credit card for business because it had no fee, offered a nice rewards program, good reporting tools and a cash sign-up incentive. The card has worked well for me and tax preparation has been much less stressful ever since.
A few weeks after getting my iPhone, I happened to see a commercial about the Chase Ink credit card promoting a free new iPhone app called Jot. I downloaded Jot from the Apple App store and quickly realized I had found a truly useful business tool that would save me hours of drudge work and greatly improve the quality and timeliness of my business’ financial information.
The way Jot works is uncomplicated and intuitive:
- Make a purchase with your Ink card. You immediately receive a real-time alert right on your iPhone.
- Log into Jot on your iPhone and simply tag the purchase using any descriptive tags/categories that you create. Job or account number. Customer name. Whatever categor(ies) make sense for you and your business. You can create new tags on the fly and split purchases between multiple tags as well.
- Access online reports when you need by logging into chase.com. Create custom reports quickly and easily – report your business information by date range, amount range, expense category and tags. You can easily download your purchase data to Quickbooks or other financial software.
Once you tag transactions, Jot offers a flexible and easy to use too for reporting business information.
My sole criticism of the Chase Ink Credit Card Jot program is that they need to streamline the iPhone login process. Currently, Jot does not remember your username and/or password requiring, instead, that you type in the full credentials each time. No doubt this is a security measure, but typing this data in using the iPhone keyboard multiple times in a day can be cumbersome – especially for those of us using longer, secure passwords.
The Payoff – The Chase Ink Credit Card Jot app for iPhone has already save me at least three hours of work in just the month or so I’ve been using it. My time is conservatively worth $75/hour to me. so if I save 3 hours per month, annual savings will be $2,700 (3 x 12 x $75) – easily enough to justify my iPhone purchase.
Filed under: iPhone • Small Business Finance
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Great post on the Jot Application and love the idea of being informed instantly of purchases. You mentioned it’s a pain to log into the app each time, is there a application out there that would remember all your login credentials? Like your browser does when you log into a site for the first time?
Thanks!
I went to download this app and all the reviews complained that it does not save logins. It only rates 2 stars, but I’m trying it out.