Between 2006 and 2007, ExpenseWatch gained 6,500 new subscribers and 82 new customers.

“Expensewatch.com is a terrific, customer-focused company with a value proposition that makes sense for every small-to-midsize business. Until recently, integrated expense control across travel and entertainment, invoice management and purchasing was really only affordable for the largest companies. Expensewatch.com is changing the way we think about expense management—the online tools are easy to use and automate time consuming paper flow,” stated Stephen Campbell, CIO of Bezos Expeditions. “We see significant opportunities for growth in this market as more and more businesses experience the benefits, great value, and ease-of-use of web-based applications and services.”

The investment amount is unknown.  A competitor of ExpenseWatch is Redmond, WA-based Concur.  Jeff Bezos is the founder of Amazon.com and is Time Magazine’s 1999 ‘Person of the Year.’  Bezos Expeditions is also an investor in 37signals.

First of all, you can share co-worker contact information across the network.  You can also assign tasks, set follow-ups, and send thank you notes through the task assignment feature.  You can also keep a history log of calls, conversations, and e-mails with customers and vendors.

Signing up for the software for 30 days is free so that you can browse the features in depth before deciding whether this software is for you.  Basic plans start at $24/month and as you would like to add more features such as file sharing upgrades or adding more users, the price-per-month increases to as high as $149/month.

I decided to test the software out with the 30 day free trial.  To register, you need to enter your first and last name, the time zone, the company name, and choose a username and password.  Once you sign-up, you are also assigned a unique Highrise website address.  In this case, the Pulse 2.0 test site address is http://pulse2.highriseenq.com.   Here is what the user interface looks like:

As you can see, there is a Dashboard where you can maintain contact invitations and tasks.  There is also a separate contacts page where you can view the contact information of the various users in the groups.  Another page for task management is also available [screen shot below]:

On the task page you assign due dates and categories to the individual tasks.  The last tab on the page is Cases.  Cases is where you can discuss projects and also share files amongst other users in the account.  Cases require a Plus, Premium, or Max plan.

Another interesting feature of Highrise is the ability to upload vCards to the website.  “vCard is a file format standard for personal data interchange, specifically electronic business cards [Source: Wikipedia].”

Upon inspecting Highrise software, I strongly believe that this online collaboration tool could be useful for companies of any size. Organization within a company is always quintessential.