Expensify Blog

It’s been an exciting past few weeks for us at Expensify and, now, March 10th officially marked the first year of Expensify being live and available to a mass audience. What better way to celebrate than throw a Mile High Party in the 19th floor penthouse of the building we work in?

DJ Asbestos spins at the Expensify Mile High Party

We were honored with the presence of our amazing users, Greg from Cannonball winery, and Jamie from Ty Ku were nice enough to donate several cases of wine and spirits, our investors came out to share in the cheer and many more wonderful friends helped to make the evening a success.

Take a look at our major milestones since March of 2009:
- Raised $1M of funding with investments from Hillsven Capital, Baseline Ventures, and Travis Kalanick
- Tripled in size with the addition of 4 new hires to continue development, improve layout, spread the word and keep expense reports suck free.
- Launched out of Beta and in to our 1.0 offering.
- Integrated with Outright, Salesforce and Intuit.
- Launched in the Google Apps Marketplace

There are many more stepping stones that got us where we are, but we won’t bore you with the details. And if you missed the party, no worries, there’s always next year.

A big thanks to every one of our users and supporters that made the first year possible!

If you are a small business, or if you sell to small businesses, the Google Apps Marketplace is a Big Deal. Taking those in turn:

If you aren’t already using Google Apps to host your small business infrastructure, you probably should. It’s free for most, and inexpensive for the rest. But it’s incredibly convenient for all due to single signin, central administration, and a generally consistent experience across the board. That convenience for you (and your employees) translates into higher productivity, meaning more hours out selling/building/working, and fewer hours of confusion and employee angst. That story has been true for some time. But with this latest announcement, it’s even more true because now third-party applications can seamlessly integrate with Google Apps to provide a seamless experience between not just Google applications, but all applications.

This is where the other side of the coin comes in: if you sell applications to small businesses, the Google Apps Marketplace is a really big deal. There are a lot of small businesses out there. In the US alone, there are over 25 million. That’s a huge market. But it’s a hugely fragmented market. Getting the word out is an enormous challenge, and marketplaces like Intuit Workplace, Salesforce.com, and — now — Google App Marketplace are crucial to pulling it off.

See, to succeed in selling to small businesses, you need an incredibly low cost of sale that scales to incredibly high volumes. You can’t have a bunch of sales people out chasing a $10/mo customer. Rather, you need those $10/mo customers to sign up 24 hours a day, day after a day, to add up to a reliable revenue stream. That means they need to find you. And contrary to expectation, they’re probably not looking for you in a search engine. Rather, they’re looking for you in a marketplace: on their phone, inside QuickBooks, or inside Google Apps.

With all that said, let me happily announce our own latest integration: Expensify in the Google Apps Marketplace!

Expensify is integrated with the Google Apps Marketplace

We’re huge fans of application marketplaces: we’re the “Most Viewed” application in Intuit Workplace, a Salesforce.com “Force 40″ application, and have high-rated apps in the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and (surprisingly popular) Palm Pre stores. Each of these marketplaces has been a powerful gateway into a new demographic: Intuit for accountants, Salesforce for salesfolk, mobile for the modern man. Each of these groups is huge, but hugely fragmented. These marketplaces provide a powerful, cost-effective way to get the word out on a massive scale.

Accordingly, we’re very exited for this latest integration with the Google Apps Marketplace as it puts us a click away from IT managers at millions of small- to medium-sized businesses worldwide. And that’s not a metaphor: literally we’re one click away (ok, two if you’re being picky) when Expensify is installed in your universal navigation bar.

Add the Expensify app to your Google Apps. Find us under the More -> Expenses tab

Once the Expensify app is integrated with your Google Apps domain, you’ll gain access to our full expense report management powers right from the universal navigation bar.  Click on more to expand the tab and select Expenses to access Expensify from within Google Apps. This means everyone in your organization — from the lowest temp to the highest executive, whether you have 1 or 1000 employees — can put down the glue sticks and paperclips and start doing expense reports that don’t suck.

To learn more, please check out our short list of 1-minute tutorials to get acquainted with the features that are going to ease your expense reporting pains.

We’ve had several people asking us whether scanned, photographed or otherwise electronic receipts are legal and accepted by the IRS for tax purposes. We did some digging and found the answer to share with everyone.

The short answer is YES, electronic receipts are legal and accepted by the IRS for tax and audit purposes as long as they can be accessed reliably, in case of an audit, and are legible (irs.gov). A short list of acceptable electronic documents are scanned or photographed images of original receipts, credit card receipts, and credit card statements that show the amount, date of payment, and the vendor or merchant.

I'm valid!

If you’re into legalese, the two articles dealing directly with the legality of electronic receipts for tax purposes are IRS Publication 552 and even more information about electronic receipts can be found starting on page 9 of IRS Revenue Procedure 97-22 (PDF).

Please note that we can not give out tax advice, so check with your tax agent or attorney.

We’re listening to users and rolling out improvements to our service as fast as we can get them done. Curtis has been putting in his share of work and today marks the release of an updated Expenses dialog. What’s the fuss all about you ask? Here’s the latest changes to the Expenses dialog:

The Expenses dialog has been updated to allow direct mileage tracking and a search box to filter expenses quickly

• The credit card and cash filters were moved to their own tab under Cards.  Add more credit cards to import expenses from and filter which card’s expenses are shown from this tab.
• Track mileage from the Add Mileage tab. Pick the date of travel, enter the amount of miles traveled, set your reimbursable rate per mile (we’ve automatically filled in the federal rate of $0.55/mile), and select the category to classify the mileage expense. Click New Expense and we’ll do the multiplication to add a categorized mileage expense to your list of expenses.
• Now you can search through all of your expenses instantly. Open the new Search tab and start typing. Your expenses will be filtered on the fly to reflect what you are typing in to the search box.
• Stylistic clean up and optimizations were put in effect all over the place to make the dialog easier to read and your expense data faster to browse through.

Sign in and check out the new features available to you!

You’ve asked for it, and we listened. Now you can upload your scanned, digitized, text, html, and pretty much any other type of receipt directly to your account or directly to an expense that needs a receipt image.

Upload digital receipts directly to your account

For detailed instructions on how to use the new direct receipt upload feature, as well as to check out all the supported file types for receipts, check out our uploading receipts help page.

We’ve just released a relatively small but significant change: now you can add custom fields to your Expensify expense reports, thereby asking your employees to provide any extra information you require — right on the report itself. It’s our way of allowing you to make the transition from your current expense reporting process to Expensify as seamless and linear as possible.

The text boxes to populate the newly created custom fields will appear below the text box for the report title. Once text is entered, the entry will show up on the top right of the expense report.

There is no limit to the amount of custom fields you may add to an expense policy. Use them to provide more details, contact names and numbers, project names and identification numbers or anything else you may need to indicate on your expense report. For more information on how to add custom fields to an expense policy you created, or to create a new expense policy with custom fields, visit our expense policy help page.

UPDATE: We are the only expense report app to be listed for the February update on precentral.com. Read about it here.

Rejoice Palm Pre owners! The long awaited, freshly released Palm Pre expense tracking app is available for download.  Open the app catalog on your Palm Pre and search for “Expensify” to download our expense app.  Continually adding to our mobile apps, the Palm Pre app joins the already released iPhone, BlackBerry and Android apps to round out the smart phone expense app offering.

The Palm Pre allows you to…

Add Cash Expenses

Upload cash expenses with attached receipts using Expensify's Palm Pre app.

Grabbing last minute supplies for a presentation with a big client?  Click “Add Expense” and enter in the name of the merchant where you made the purchase, the amount of the expense, and a brief note for yourself to remember the purchase.  You can also quickly snap a picture of the cash receipt and forget it completely as it’ll be uploaded to your Expensify account for when you need to create your expense report.

Upload Receipt Images

Upload receipts using Expensify's Palm Pre app.

In a hurry?  Forget adding in all the details that instant.  Just snap a picture of the receipt and go on with your busy day.  The cash receipt will be waiting for you to attach it to an expense the next time you log in to your account.

Search for “Expensify” in the Palm Pre app catalog, install the app and take control of your cash expenses and receipts.

We’ve had a lot of requests for exporting Expensify reports into FreshBooks invoices, so last night Witold and I decided to take on a late night project to whip it up. We were really impressed with the simplicity of the FreshBooks API, so the whole thing went in smoothly in just a couple hours. Accordingly, behold! FreshBooks expense reports exported straight from Expensify!

If you know that that means, take a look at drop me a line to let me know what you think. There’s a couple ways to do it and we’ve opted with the simplest for now; let me know if you’d like the data exported in a different way.

On the other hand, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, it basically means this:

1. Import your credit card into Expensify, as normal.
2. Create, submit, and process an Expensify expense report, as normal.
3. But when done, check out the flashy new Export to FreshBooks button.
4. Click it and we’ll connect straight to your FreshBooks account, create a new invoice, and attach each of the itemized expenses.

The upshot is it lets you harness the power of Expensify for expense reporting, but combine it with the power of FreshBooks for invoicing. This is particularly handy for contractors with lots of “rebillable” expenses, as you can use Expensify to record those on the road using our suite of mobile apps, manage all the receipts online, export into QuickBooks for tracking, and then export to FreshBooks for invoicing. Pretty slick, eh?

Oh, and how much does it cost? It’s included for free in a standard Expensify account (which is free for individuals and very-small businesses).

And perhaps it’s not worth mentioning but I will, this works with all the standard Expensify features including support for 58 international currencies (with conversion on the day the expense was incurred), hour and mileage tracking, mobile expense logging and receipt scanning, direct import for most debit cards and 94% of US credit cards (and OFX upload for the rest), etc. By itself it’s a pretty small feature, but in conjunction with everything else, I’m hoping it’ll be a huge help for all the contractors who have requested this. Enjoy!

-david
Follow us on Twitter at @expensify

We’ve been working away at simplifying the expense reporting process for everyone involved.  In that time we’ve added several mobile expense apps, launched out of Beta and in to our 1.0 offering a refined feature set such as greater policy support and a more intuitive QuickBooks export process.  Now, we’ve added videos to literally show everyone how much we’ve simplified the process of expense reporting. Watch how quick it is to create an expense report with Expensify.   But we don’t just stop there!  This set of videos will take you through the entire expense reporting process: importing expense data from your credit card, creating your first expense report and submitting it for approval, approving a submitted report and then sharing it with a bookkeeper, and, how to export the report to QuickBooks.

Import your credit card
Importing your credit card has several advantages. First and foremost: it saves you time, lots of time. As a majority of your expenseable purchases are already on your card, linking your card and importing your purchase history makes creating an expense report a breeze. Our card import process is secure and trusted so you can feel confident importing your expense information. We currently import 94% of all US credit cards, so chances are we’ve got you covered. If you’d like to get more detailed, written information on creating and submitting expense reports, visit the employee’s getting started page.

Create an expense report
Once your credit card expenses have been imported, it’s time to create an expense report. Learn how to create a new report, add individual expenses right from your credit card, check that all eReceipts are attached and then submit it to the person who approves your expenses. After you send your report for approval, we’ll send you an email letting you know as soon as it approved and awaiting reimbursement.

Approve and share an expense report
Has an employee or contractor submitted an expense report to you using Expensify? Wondering how to check over the expense and get a copy to your bookkeeper? Watch this video to find out how to check all of the expenses, approve the expense report and then either reimburse it share it with a bookkeeper so that it can be exported to QuickBooks and reimbursed. For more detailed information on getting started as the person who approves reports, visit the manager’s getting started page.

Export an expense report in to QuickBooks
This video deals with expense reports from the perspective of the bookkeeper. Learn how to access a report that was shared with you, and then export it to QuickBooks. This video shows the process to connect QuickBooks Online to Expensify, including going through the QuickBooks connection interview. After your QuickBooks company has been connected, the video continues with an overview of the QuickBooks export options available. Visit the bookkeepers information page to learn more about the options available to simplify processing and tracking expenses.

All of the videos can also be viewed on our Video How-tos Help page.

Happy Expensifying!