Expensify Blog

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
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