Archive for December 2009
2010 reimbursable mileage rates
The IRS has released the new reimbursement rate for mileage in 2010:
• 50 cents per mile for business miles driven
• 16.5 cents per mile driven for medical or moving purposes
• 14 cents per mile driven in service of charitable organizations
The new mileage rates “reflect generally lower transportation costs compared to a year ago.” (IRS)
For now, all current users will need to change their mileage rate in Settings after they have completed their last 2009 expense report. Update your expense mileage by:
- After logging in, click on Settings
- Scroll down to “Customize your units”
- Click “[change]” next to mile, type in “.5″ and hit “ok.”
For the visual folks, follow along with the video below to change your mileage rate:
Done! Your expense reports will now be created using the reimbursable mileage rate for 2010.
Expensify’s 1.0 Launch
We just launched out of Beta and in to 1.0! The results of our blood, sweat and tears many days of hard work are finally visible. With that, I’m proud to announce the following major changes:
* Totally new UI: Based on your feedback we’ve made massive UI changes to be faster, more intuitive, and generally sharper looking across the board. Enjoy!
* QuickBooks overhaul: Attention bookkeepers, accountants, and finance departments: the wait is over! You can now create categories from your QuickBooks chart of accounts, share them with employees, auto-categorize based on merchant type, and export everything to the appropriate accounts automatically.
* More mobile apps: In addition to our iPhone app, we now have BlackBerry and Android apps (with Palm Pre awaiting approval). Expensify goes on the road with you!
* International currencies: Not a fan of USD? How about EUR, CAD, GBP, or any of 54 other currencies? Mix-and-match within the report and we’ll convert based on the closing exchange rate on the day the expense was incurred.
* No longer free (for new users): And last but not least — because I know this has actually been a concern for many of you — we’re now less free than ever! Starting immediately, we charge $5/reporter/mo with the first two free (so if you receive reports from 3 people a month, it costs you $5/mo). As a thank you to everyone that has used Expensify and supported us during our trying times in Beta, we’re grandfathering you in to a free plan for life! We couldn’t have made the countless changes and improvements without your help; Thanks!
That’s all for now, but lots more is on the way. Please send any questions, comments, or suggestions to help@expensify.com, and we’ll take care of it. We’ve also created the definitive “Expense Report” group where you can share your tips and tricks as well as your feedback.
For more coverage, check out the article on TechCrunch
Until then, I look forward to seeing you for your next expense report!
RockYou… Encryption is your friend.
Remember when Danger lost all their backups? At that time I wrote about Expensify’s massively redundant, multi-tiered backup system (to two remote locations in realtime, and to two more remote locations nightly) in a passionate appeal to sanity. Soon after that I turned off my Sidekick for the last time, and turned on my shiny new Palm Pre. (And I ain’t going back!)
But now I read that RockYou has compromised the usernames and logins to 32 million social networking accounts because they didn’t encrypt a damn thing? Come on people! Encryption is so… I don’t know, 1942?
At Expensify, we take security incredibly seriously. We spent pretty much the entire first year building a geo-redundant, PCI compliant datacenter that achieves… actually, now that I think about it pretty amazingly high uptime, while simultaneously remaining super secure. It wasn’t easy. But that’s our job. It’s not an optional thing. Either you do it secure, or you don’t do it at all.
In our case, we use a type of encryption called “split knowledge, dual control”. It’s more complex than this, but we basically split our master encryption key in half, and store each half in a different safe deposit box (Witold controls one, I control the other) such that nobody ever knows the whole thing. This means nobody can decrypt our data alone, not even me.
Additionally, this key is assembled in memory on our servers using a type of “turn two keys simultaneously” system (akin to a nuclear launch panel) and never written to disk. So even if you physically stole the servers out of our hardened datacenters (something you’d be a fool to try), they’d be little more than really expensive paperweights.
Anyway, I understand social networking data isn’t as sensitive as financial data. And I understand most web developers don’t know how to deploy and maintain realtime distributed transaction layers.
But I don’t find those very satisfying excuses, and I doubt you do either.
