Expensify Blog

I’m very flattered to announce that Expensify has been picked by Lead411 as one of the “fastest growing companies of San Francisco”. Woot! Press release follows:

Hottest San Francisco Company Awardees Announced by Lead411
Lead411 recognizes the fastest growing technology companies in San Francisco

Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) February 21, 2012
In order to recognize the hottest technology companies in San Francisco, Lead411 (http://www.lead411.com) is proud to announce the release of the ‘Hottest Companies in San Francisco” awards for 2012.

Background
On a daily basis, the Lead411 research team scours through at least 600 press releases and business articles including venture capital financings, company launches, office openings, new customer press releases, etc. This information has given insight to which are the fastest growing technology companies in U.S. Their “Hot List” awards have been created to recognize these fast growing companies. This particular list originally started with over 2600 companies and it has been narrowed down to the top 80.

“This is our 3rd Annual San Francisco award. We are pleased with the recognition the Award has received over the past few years,” said Tom Blue, CEO of Lead411, “and we are very proud of the respected list of companies for the 2012 winners.”

How the List Was Chosen
First, all companies must be in either the Software, Wireless, Hardware, Internet, or Media industry, a privately held organization, and be within San Francisco region. From there, each company must meet one or more of the following requirements;

100% increase in revenues over the past 2 years
OR $5M+ in funding in the past 2 years.

List of Company Names:
3VR Security, Inc, 99designs, Affine Systems, Anaplan Inc, AppDynamics, Bleacher Report, Bricsnet US, LLC, BrightRoll, BrightTALK Inc, Cantaloupe Systems, ClearSlide, CloudFlare, CollabNet Inc, Crowd Factory, Crowdcast , CrowdFlower , Demandbase, Inc, Dropbox, eCert Inc., Eventbrite, Inc., Evolv On-Demand, Expensify Inc, Extole, Flingo, Flite, Inc, Flurry, Inc., Formspring.me, Inc, Framehawk, Get Satisfaction, Inc., Good Data, Grockit Inc, Hotel Tonight Inc. , Huddle US, Idle Games, InsideView, Jaspersoft, Jawbone, Joyent Inc, KIXEYE, Kontagent, KXEN Inc, Lumosity, Marin Software, Martini Media, Mashery, Inc, Metacafe, Inc, mFoundry, MoBeam Inc, New Relic, PlayFirst Inc, PowerReviews Inc, Practice Fusion, Prosper Marketplace, Inc, Quid Inc, RadiumOne, Rocket Ninja Inc, Scality, Scribd, Servicemax Inc, Socialcast, Spigit, StackMob, Steelwedge Inc., Stitcher, Stripe, StumbleUpon, Sugar Inc, Tapjoy, Taulia Inc., The GigaOM Network, Ticketfly, TokBox Inc, Twelvefold Media, Twitter, VirtuOz Inc, Xobni Corporation, Xoom Corporation, Yammer Inc, Zimride, Inc, Zinio LLC,

List and Details:
The entire list including more details about the award and winners can be found at

http://www.lead411.com/awards/2012/san-francisco.html

About Lead411
Lead411 provides information, news, and research about U.S. companies and their executives. Founded in 2001, its goal has been to focus on quality corporate data that is valid and useful rather than producing as many company records as possible. In addition, Lead411 tracks company news in order to alert its customers about venture financing, new hires, hiring plans, etc. Customers include Gartner, Administaff and ADP

This week is going to be an unusual Pro Tip Monday… our recent success with weekly Webinars has made us want to do more! We want to find out the relevant topics that we know our amazing users will benefit from (yes, this is going to be one of those blog posts)

We currently have two Webinars that we do every week – one on each Wednesday and Friday at 11:30am PST. On Wednesday we go over the basics – how to create expenses, create a report and put expenses in the report to then submit to your manager. On Friday, we go over how to link your company’s Expensify Policy with your accounting software. To register for either one of these, just choose the day below:

Wednesday webinars: Using Expensify
Wed, Feb 15, 2012 11:30 AM – 12:00 PM PST
Wed, Feb 22, 2012 11:30 AM – 12:00 PM PST
Wed, Feb 29, 2012 11:30 AM – 12:00 PM PST
Wed, Mar 7, 2012 11:30 AM – 12:00 PM PST

Friday webinars: Company Setup and Integrating Expensify with your Accounting Package
Fri, Feb 17, 2012 11:30 AM – 12:00 PM PST
Fri, Feb 24, 2012 11:30 AM – 12:00 PM PST
Fri, Mar 2, 2012 11:30 AM – 12:00 PM PST
Fri, Mar 9, 2012 11:30 AM – 12:00 PM PST

Over the past couple of weeks, our attendance for these Webinars have more than doubled (which is awesome!) and we want to add 2 more to this weekly list.

SO this is where you come in: as our awesome users, what would you like to see? What do you think would be helpful for your company and/or companies like yours to see?

Any and all feedback is welcome!!

As always, if you have any questions, do not hesitate to send us an email: Help@Expensify.com

Update 1: If you missed this week’s Wednesday Webinar, here it is:

Update 2: And if you missed our Friday webinar:

Update: You might also enjoy our new Chrome Extension, or just sign in and click “import from…” on the Receipts page to see all the options below and more — including our new desktop scanning integration!

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 13, 2012 /PRNewswire/ – Expense reports suck, and receipts are to blame. Expensify claims to offer “expense reports that don’t suck!” and they can’t be too bad — 100,000 companies now use Expensify, who upload over 10,000 receipts and submit over $2M in expense reports every day. But a challenge this great requires allies, so Expensify created the ScanAnywhere Alliance: a fearless crew fighting the toxic tide of crumpled, BPA-laced receipts lurking in pockets everywhere.

• Dacuda, inventor of the “LG LSM-100 Mouse Scanner” (in partnership with LG Electronics, and available at Fry’s and NewEgg): the first mouse that doubles as a realtime scanner such that you can capture receipts of all sizes (including long, long receipts) and use them directly inside Expensify.
• Genius Scan, an incredibly popular app that turns your iPhone into a pocket scanner by automatically finding the edges of the receipt, neatly cropping out the background, white balancing the remainder, and making it look like you used a flatbed scanner.
• Lemon, a beautiful new mobile money management tool, which provides a fresh perspective on your spending by scanning the purchase details from paper and email receipts, and then neatly categorizing them for your review and analysis — on the web and on your phone.
• OneReceipt puts all your purchases in one place, automatically aggregating purchase information from both online and print receipts. The website, and app coming soon, gives users a full look at their spending, with return alerts, shipping information and organizing tools to save you time and money.

But this is only the beginning. Even as we go into battle a single, unified force, we are in secret negotiations with ever more partners to swell our ranks. Visit http://blog.expensify.com to learn more, contact david@expensify.com to join, or see our intrepid CEO David Barrett speak live at SXSW about “How the Wallet Was Won: The End of Paper Receipts“. Together we stand, and together, we will prevail.

About Expensify
Expensify does “Expense reports that don’t suck!” by importing eReceipts from credit cards, SmartScanning paper receipts from mobile phones, submitting expense reports through email, and reimbursing everything online with QuickBooks and direct deposit. Expensify has raised $6.7M, builds incredible technology, and is always hiring.

Love Expensify?

Have an Android phone?

Well, your life just got a whole lot better.

Take a look at what got a huge update today; our Android app!

Tony & Tom.

Team Mobile

Looking back on the year, one of our major accomplishments in 2011 was releasing SmartScanning – the option to have our system pick out the details of an expense from the image of its receipt. Many of you jumped right on board and started feeding our app with your receipts, sharing the goodness with your friends. Towards the end of the year, we reached a critical mass and made SmartScanning completely free until 2012 to really put our system to the test.

Now, after processing hundreds of thousands of SmartScanned images, we have learned a lot and fixed mistakes that couldn’t have otherwise been predicted.  As we continue to learn and find ways to improve, changes like increasing accuracy, and decreasing scanning time will make their way in to the system.  Some of the planned changes though are forward facing and more immediate:

• More free! Many of you have just a few receipts to deal with every month and there’s no good reason for us to hobble you just to eek out a few extra pennies. Instead of giving each account 10 free SmartScans, we now replenish them and give each account 10 free SmartScans each and every month!
• End of month billing. Just like your utilities, your phone and most any other usage based service, it makes sense to receive a total for all of your activity at the end of the month. Any receipts which are SmartScanned above the free monthly quota will now be billed to you at the end of the month.

With these changes on the horizon, the high level pitch and functionality remain the same: SmartScanning will take any uploaded receipt and pick out the date, merchant and purchase amount from the image.  The SmartScanned information is used to create a line item expense entry for that receipt, or to attach it to a matching credit card purchase.  Any SmartScans used above the free monthly quota will be billed at only 20¢ each at the end of the month.  Learn more about SmartScans.

Happy Scanning in 2012!

We get the best guest stars to do our commercials…

The apps:

iPhone
Android
BlackBerry
Windows Phone

Many of you have been asking for mileage support in our iPhone app -
so here it is, in the form of Expensify Lite!

This rounds out our offering of mobile apps by having the same app available on the four major smartphone platforms: iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone. Let’s see how it looks on the iPhone:

To install it, just click here, or search for “Expensify Lite” on your iPhone.

As with our other mobile apps, this app includes mileage & odometer entry, business card scanning, comments on receipts, and offline support!

But if you’re looking for more expense report management features in your iPhone app, our “Expensify – Expense Reports” app is still available in the App Store. Both apps are available, so pick whichever suits you best!

Tom.
Team Mobile

As you might have seen on the site, we’ve done some serious reshuffling.  To give you some quick background on each, the major changes include:

• More free scans! — It’s always free to upload receipt images without using our premium “scanning” feature.  And previously we gave every new account 10 free receipt scans, period.  But we’re raising the bar and now all accounts get 10 free scans every month.  Our data suggests that that’s adequate for about 98% of active users, with only a 2% of “power users” going beyond that (and they go *way* beyond that).
• And to celebrate just how awesome things are going, we’re giving away unlimited free receipt scanning through the rest of 2011.  Have you got a box of receipts you want to organize before the new year?  Now’s the perfect chance — scan away to your heart’s content and it won’t cost you a dime!
• 50-State Reimbursement! — We’ve made some very difficult and expensive but extremely boring legal changes that now allow us to reimburse via direct deposit in all 50 states (previously we only did 12). We’ve also dramatically changed the setup process to do away with “voided checks” and instead just have you enter your own information and confirm it with a series of “test deposits”. The result is a more seamless setup experience with universal coverage.
• New tiered account plans — Until now, every Expensify user had the same account with the same capabilities.  This worked surprisingly well, but as our user count skyrockets, we’ve found that it’s useful to have different “tiers” of accounts targeted to different users with different requirements.  All the functionality you’ve come to know and love is still there (and a bunch more), but now not all of it is thrown into everybody’s face all the time.  To change your plan, just go to https://expensify.com/upgrade and read all about it.
• New “Corporate” features — Recognizing the needs of some of our larger customers, we’ve added:
• GL Codes – Advanced, highly-customizable accounting integration with a wider variety of ledger systems.
• Domain Control – Central administration of accounts while protecting the privacy of users.
• Digital Signatures – Enhanced audit trail with signed snapsohts of the report stored at key points.
• No more Personal policy — just personal settings.  In the past, the “policy” is what defined your tags and categories.  Every new account included a “Personal” policy, such that everybody could configure their own categories and tags.  However, a policy also does a whole lot more than that, and the rest of the policy functionality was confusing users who just wanted the basics.  So, lesson learned!  Now you configure your categories in tags in a “Settings” section called, that’s right, “Categories and Tags”.  Brilliant!
• No more People page — Along the top of every page is a “nav bar” that has such items as “Expenses”, “Receipts”, and so on.  It previously had a “People” section that showed essentially everybody with who you’ve interacted.  However, it’s completely redundant with the “People” section inside each policy, has been a big hassle to maintain, and almost nobody used it.  So in the interests of staying focused on building the tightest, simplest product possible, we removed it.  I don’t think you’ll miss it, but if you, do — I apologize for the inconvenience!
• “Billable” and “Reimbusable” flags are now hidden — Specifically, you no longer see these flags unless you’re using a shared policy.  (The theory being that those flags only make sense in the context of groups, so let’s not confuse people individuals who are using Expensify.)
• And tons of smaller changes that you probably won’t notice.  Our general strategy is to make small, continuous, unannounced changes across the board, making the whole site a little better every day.  But when we do something big like this, we figure it’s best to just let give you a heads up to alleviate any potential for confusion.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for using Expensify.  Please contact help@expensify.com if you have any questions at all.  Keep on Expensifying!

-david
Founder and CEO of Expensify
Follow us at http://twitter.com/expensify

We’re proud to announce that you can now log your mileage, track expenses and scan receipts on our 4th mobile app – this one for the newest kid on the block – Windows Phone 7!

What’s included?

And of course, thanks to our cross-platform mobile library, all the good stuff from the Android and BlackBerry apps.

To install it, first upgrade your phone to “Mango” (Windows Phone 7.5) if you haven’t already. And then just click here, or go to the Windows Phone Marketplace and search for “Expensify”.

The first wave of reviewers already seem pleased:

“This is the most elegant and seamless way of keeping track of travel expenses and generating reports. Thrilled to see it available on Windows Phone!!! A must have..”

Let us know what you think of the app in the comments!

We just finished a joint integration with Evernote that enables you to create expenses from receipt images and churn out clean, searchable PDFs of expense reports!  So even if you can’t remember everything, you’ll still be able to search for it.

Create expenses from receipt images
Put all of your plane tickets, hotel invoices, car reservations and other receipts in to the Expensify folder. We will sync with it automatically and scan the merchant, date and amount from each receipt image to create an expense entry. So easy, you may forget how to type.

Keep track of your expense reports
A new export option allows you to send your created reports back in to the Expensify folder inside Evernote.  Want everything done for you?  Enable automatic export and any time a report is submitted, approved, reimbursed or just has its status changed we’ll update your Evernote account with the latest copy.  Fully searchable PDF expense reports are now at your fingertips!

Give it a try – link your Evernote account!