Expensify now allows you to take Expense Reports created or submitted to you and re-bill them as an Invoice to your clients. Apply mark-up on materials purchased on behalf of your client. Upload your logo into Expensify and we’ll slap it on the invoice. Determine and communicate your custom payment terms.  If your clients already use Expensify they can even pay your invoices directly within Expensify with the same great options that are available for our Expense Reports: ACH Direct Deposit, PayPal, and even Bitcoin!

Ok, so what if your vendors dont use Expensify? You can still send them invoices – just click Attach PDF before you hit send.

We know most users want to keep their bills and invoices in the same program, so we developed Bill Processing to be incredibly easy.  When you activate Invoicing/Bill Processing we create an email address for you to give out to your vendors. Example: YourCompany@bills.expensify.com. Any bills sent to that email address will be SmartScanned and populated into your Expensify account.

We built this functionality because our users were complaining they didn’t like having to export their expenses into Freshbooks or Quickbooks in order to send out Invoices. Well, now you can seamlessly handle Expense Reports, Invoicing, and Bill Processing within one interconnected, powerful tool.

We’ve added more information on our help pages so check those out here:

• http://help.expensify.com/invoices
• http://help.expensify.com/bill-processing
  

As always, if you have any questions about Expensify or need help getting your company set up, feel free to email help@expensify.com.

Read the press release here: http://prn.to/YGXBuj

Last month we announced Amex Corporate Card Reconciliation and received a huge enthusiastic response from our users. Due to the popularity of the feature and user demand, we have expanded Corporate Card Reconciliation to many more major banks. The new Banks we have added are below:

• Bank of America
• Chase
• Citibank
• Capital One
• TDBank (Business)
• Bank of the West
• Commonwealth Bank (Business)
• Fifth Third
• U.S. Bank
• Wells Fargo

If your company uses Corporate Cards from a bank not listed above, please contact help@expensify.com and we will work on getting your cards supported.

What is Reconciliation?

Reconciliation is an amazing feature that allows you to reconcile all incurred Corporate card expenses against reported expenses in the Expensify system. Reconciliation reports are great for seeing any outstanding Corporate card expenses that still need submitting as well as those that have already been submitted.

What is Central Administration?

Central Administration allows you to import your American Express Corporate card feed and assign individual cards to specific employees. Simply put, it allows you to populate your employees’ Expensify accounts with expenses from their individual Corporate card without any work from them.

How do I get it?

To have access to Reconciliation reports, you will need to upgrade to the Corporate plan and enable Domain Control. From the admin tab, you will then be able to centrally assign your corporate cards to users.

For more information on Corporate Card Reconciliation, check out our original post on reconciliation.

Important Note:

If your employees are already importing their corporate cards individually, make sure to have them remove this connection once you begin to import them centrally. This guards against duplicate reporting of transactions.

If you have any questions about either of these features or setting up, reach out to us at help@expensify.com and we’ll get you on your way to simpler expense reporting!

Wow! April was a big month for Expensify in the media. Our Bitcoin Reimbursement announcement drew a large amount of attention. Our CEO, David Barrett was asked to speak on 3 different news programs: FoxBusiness, SkyNews, and CNBC! In addition to television appearances, we had a multitude of tech blogs write up on why our Bitcoin adoption was a big deal. Here are some highlights:

• Wall Street Journal - Receipt Wranglers: Expensify Virtual Accountant
• Bloomberg Businessweek - Expensify brings Bitcoin to Main Street
• TechCrunch - Expensify adds Bitcoin support as PayPal Alternative
• PCWorld - Bitcoin Surges past $100, gains Expensify support
• International Business Times - Bitcoins Accepted by Expensify, Surpasses 20 National Currencies
• VentureBeat - Expensify Adds Bitcoin Support
• The Next Web - Expensify Adds Bitcoin to Offer Instantaneous International Reimbursement
• CITE World - Bitcoin Takes Big Step into Mainstream with Expensify Support
• TechFaster - Combining Two Things that Don’t Suck, Expensify Now Supports Bitcoin
• Falkvinge - Why Expensify Endorsing Bitcoin is a Really Big Deal

Another exciting development this past month was our Office Dog, Lemony Cricket, winning the Muse Ultimate Office Mate competition! She faced fierce competition from other adorable dogs from the offices of Global Giving, AOL, Uber, & Zoosk. In the end, Lemony emerged victorious as the Ultimate Office Mate! Thank you to everyone who supported our beloved pup. We’ve included some adorable GIFs of Lemony as thanks!

We’ve added a ton of cool features to Expensify so far this year and we’re just getting started. We have a HUGE announcement coming up this month, so stay tuned. Expensify is only getting better! Thanks for your support and have a great weekend!

Safety First:

We use bank-level security to keep your sensitive financial data safe. We’re tested regularly to ensure our security measures are up to date, and even subscribe to daily probing by McAfee to make sure that we can defend against the latest hacker tactics.

We take your security seriously and comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. This comprehensive analysis that spans many aspects of how systems interact is the gold standard of security measures for anyone taking credit card information online. The same rigorous standard is used by PayPal, Visa and YOUR bank. For more information on its requirements, check out the PCI-DSS website.

The Basics:

Import your card(s) automatically by logging into Expensify > going to Settings > Credit Cards > Import Card/Bank. You will then just need to find your bank and input your online banking username and password.

You will then want to select what accounts you do want to pull into Expensify and whether or not these accounts should default as being marked as reimbursable expenses or non-reimbursable expenses.

Having issues?

We work hard so that our users have as few issues as possible when it comes to importing your credit cards, but every now and again you may find that your card is not updating automatically. If you do find yourself in this situation here are some helpful tips:

1. Manually update your card:  You can do this by going to Settings > Credit Cards and selecting the ‘Update’ button to update your card. If you see a ‘Fix’ indicator, go to tip #2
2. ‘Fix’ your card: We would first recommend that you can log into your online banking portal using the same  username and password you’re using to import your card into Expensify. When you have confirmed this, please select the ‘Fix’ button and input your username and password. If this does not work, go to tip #3
3. Write help@expensify.com: As noted earlier, Expensify and the banks we import from have a very high level of security. As a result, sometimes we do need to change/update our connections which could disable the connection for a bit. User’s usually do not notice the changes but if your cards will not fix, do write help@expensify.com so we can be sure to let you know what might be going on.

Commercial Cards/Centrally Administered Cards:

If your company does have a commercial card or wants to centrally administer your corporate cards, we still have you covered. If you are interested learning more please do check out this page.

As always, if you have any questions please write us at help@expensify.com and we will be happy to assist.

Prerequisites

These basic company setup steps will need to be taken care of before setting up the Sage 50 integration:

1. Upgrade to the Corporate plan.
2. Create a company expense policy.
3. Ensure that GL codes are asscoiated with Categories.
4. Input Job ID as a report field.

Configuring Your Export File

After you’ve chosen the appropriate format for your company, you will create an export format that any admin can use to export expense data into Sage 50. To do so, visit the Export format section of your policy settings (Settings > Policies > [Policy Name] > Export Formats). Once the export format has been created, any policy admin can choose a group of reports and export them to the custom spreadsheet file.

While accounting setups are different from company to company, below is an example of a flow that has proven to be successful when integrating Expensify with Sage 50. If this does not seem to be the case for your company please write us at help@expensify.com and we will be sure to get you set up.

Example Export Format:

And you’re done! At the end of your next accounting period, you can choose which reports you’d like to export, and the information will be formatted for direct upload into Sage 50. We also have some great materials to help user import the file from Expensify into Sage 50, which you can find here. Let us know if you have any questions!

What is Reconciliation?

Reconciliation is an amazing feature that allows you to reconcile all incurred Corporate card expenses against reported expenses in the Expensify system. Reconciliation reports are great for seeing any outstanding Corporate card expenses that still need submitting as well as those that have already been submitted.

What is Central Administration?

Central Administration allows you to import your American Express Corporate card feed and assign individual cards to specific employees. Simply put, it allows you to populate your employees’ Expensify accounts with expenses from their individual Corporate card without any work from them.

How do I get it?

To have access to Reconciliation reports, you will need to upgrade to the Corporate plan and enable Domain Control. From the admin tab, you will then be able to centrally assign your corporate cards to users.

How do I create a Reconciliation report?

To run a reconciliation report, go to the Reconciliation section of the Admin tab. From there you will be able to choose the date range and criteria over which you want to run reconciliation. After the process is done, you will be able to download a spreadsheet file of your reconciliation report.

To get a more detailed run-through, please visit our Reconciliation help page.

How do I use Central Administration?

First, go to the Company Cards section of the Admin tab. Here click the ‘Import…’ button, enter your Master Account login credentials, and click ‘Sign in’.

Once your card has connected successfully, simply type in the user’s email address you’d like to add the card to, enter the last 4 digits of the corresponding card and click the ‘assign a commercial card’ button. For more information on Central Administration, please check out our Company Cards help page.

If you would like to see Reconciliation and Central Administration made available for another credit card provider, email us at help@expensify.com .

Happy Monday!

Maybe you’ve heard of Bitcoin recently in the media. It’s quickly gaining popularity and we believe we are the most mainstream company to implement it with an actual business implication. We’ve hinted that it’s coming, but today we are excited to announce Expensify has added Bitcoin as a reimbursement option for your expense reports. Fans of digital, decentralized, crypto-currencies rejoice!

We see Bitcoin as more than just a gimmick. It is a great solution to a real world problem facing businesses today – international reimbursement. We think this is a big deal. Previously, our US companies with international employees or contractors were incurring currency conversion or wire transfer fees to the tune of 4% in some cases. To this end, Bitcoin is a great tool for minimizing the cost of reimbursing companies outside of the US. As a plus, transfers are secure and instant – no more waiting multiple business days for your ACH to clear!

We’ve set up our Bitcoin help page to walk you through getting set up with Bitcoin. If you have any questions about Bitcoin reimbursement or Expensify in general, please don’t hesitate to contact us at help@expensify.com. You can view the press release here: http://prn.to/11MzPwj.

Giorgio with his idol, Ronald McDonald, in Thailand

Name: Giorgio Calderolla

Alter ego/Nickname: Gio (Joe?), Giorgio Calderoni, Giorgio Maccheroni, Giorgio Lasagne, Giorgio (insert italian food or car make here)

Hometown: Conegliano, Italy (sometimes referred to as “Coney Island” by the locals)

Role(s) at Expensify: Frontend developer, other things developer, prettifier, speedifier, streamlinizer. Being confused and hesitating for a second when someone tries to high five me, and then saying ‘ouch’.

Expensify Start Date: I don’t know! It’s all a blur. Somewhere between August ’11 and February ’12.

What is/has been your favorite project to participate on at Expensify?

I enjoy working on the little UI things. And the big UI things.

Life outside of Expensify?

Mostly app-making. Occasionally, city-exploring.

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

Oh shut up.

Favorite Beverage

I think I’m a machine that transforms coffee into code. Not sure how it works. But I can tell you for sure that when the coffee drinking stops, the code writing and other associated activities stop as well. It’s weird. So to answer your question, my favorite beverage is coffee.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Yes. A ‘craaaack thump’ sound.

Favorite flower?

Spaghetti Trees

What’s your present state of mind?

Zen-like.

We’ve bolstered our current SalesForce integration (available on our Team plan) by adding support for FinancialForce. The FinancialForce integration is available on our Corporate plan. Once you’ve setup these integrations up in your account you can:

• Centrally manage users
• Tag expenses with Salesforce Accounts and Opportunities
• Tag expenses with FinancialForce Projects and Milestones
• Submit expense reports directly to FinancialForce

Connect Expensify and Salesforce + FinancialForce

Visit our Salesforce page for instructions on how to connect Expensify and Salesforce. Once you have connected to Salesforce, you will see the option to have reports submitted to FinancialForce PSA as well. Make sure that you have created an Expensify account that has been upgraded to the Corporate plan prior to connecting to Salesforce.

Once you’ve checked the ‘Submit reports to FinancialForce PSA’ checkbox, you’ll need to click ‘Sync’ in order to initiate the connection. Whenever you need to update your FinancialForce connection, simply navigate to this page and click ‘Sync’ again.

Using the Salesforce + FinancialForce Integration

Step 1: Tag Expenses

If tags are synced, all Accounts, Opportunities, Projects, and Milestones will be pulled into Expensify from Salesforce/FinancialForce and available for users as tags.

Step 2: Submit to FinancialForce

Our submit to FinancialForce feature works just like submitting any other report in Expensify. Just click submit and you’re done!

As always, if you have any questions at all about connecting to SalesForce or FinancialForce, please reach out to our support team at help@expensify.com. Welcome to the Force!

Expensify has three geo-redundant, realtime-replicated datacenters — each of which holds more than enough hardware to power the full Expensify site, and all three combined should be massive overkill.  So why has Expensify been so slow these past few days?  A few reasons, actually:

Massive Traffic Spike.

In short, this month is off with a bang.  Nearly every day has set a new all-time traffic record, blowing away all historical averages.  Being featured in USA Today, NBC News, and the Wall Street Journal definitely contributes.  And traffic is always up at the start of the week, and the start of the month, so that’s a double-whammy.  But I think the biggest contributing factor is our friend the IRS: the April 15th deadline is looming large among our millions of users, and they are starting to take it very seriously.  This is bringing out a new user behavior we don’t have a ton of experience with: people uploading receipts in bulk by the hundreds (or even *thousands*), putting new stresses on the system.   All told, it’s causing the site to break in new and exciting ways we’ve never experienced before.  Most of those ways only affect small numbers of users, but today was different.

The Short Story.

A workaround is in place and a permanent fix is expected next week.

The Long Story.

Remember those three realtime-replicated datacenters?  ”Replicated” is a key word.  Our proprietary WAN database replication technology (which we’re hoping to open source) has been dutifully and reliably powering the site for years.  In a very general way, every command is processed like this:

1. Webserver receives a request from the web browser
2. Webserver sends the command to one of our 5 database servers
3. If it’s a “read only” command, the database processes the command and immediately responds
4. If it’s a “read/write” command, then it “escalates” the command to the “master” database — the server that’s in charge of coordinating all writes.
5. The master processes the command using a transaction
6. The master sends the SQL of the command to the child databases, who re-execute the transaction locally
7. The children all respond “looks good!” as soon as they finish their transaction
8. Once half the children respond with the all-clear, the master commits the transaction, notifies the children to commit, and notifies the original database that its command has been processed.
9. The original database receives notification from the master that the command is done, and then in turn responds to the websever with the results.

All this normally happens in around 100ms, with the replication stage (steps 6-8) taking about 40ms.  Today, it started taking on the order of 14,000ms, with replication taking about 200ms.  Furthermore, all our databases were operating at 100% CPU — even though performance had slowed to a crawl, not to mention those servers are rated for far more traffic than they were receiving.  All three of these seemed impossible on the surface, and even more impossible given that we didn’t change any hardware or software related to any of these systems.  What could make this so slow?  Three things:

• A cache
• A list
• A socket

The first seemed really obvious: let’s prioritize the important commands over the less important commands.  In order to make the Report page load quick, we precalculate a variety of aspects about the report and store them in a cache.  But updating the cache isn’t as important as actually responding to a user request, so we deprioritize it.  This is normally fine — the cache update is put on the end of the master’s command list, and when there is a lull we update them all, without delaying any realtime user actions.  What could possibly go wrong with this great optimization?

The problem is if there is no lull.  Recall that we’re seeing unprecedented levels of traffic, meaning activity levels that were previously brief spikes have become the new norm.  This means for long periods every day, we get so many high-priority commands that the master never has a chance to process the low-priority cache-update commands (known as “starvation”).  This should normally be fine — the low-priority commands would wait until the spike finished, and then everything should update fine.  No problem.

However, a byproduct of that “no problem” is an extremely large queue of escalated commands — the children sent a huge number of cache commands to the master.  This should normally be fine, except for when I wrote that code (in 2009) I assumed the number of escalated commands from any child database would always be very small.  So I used a list to hold it, meaning whenever any database got a response to an escalated command, it would need to iterate over that list to find a match.  (And there were several other occasions that it iterated over that list.)  Normally this would be fine.  But if that list gets long — like, really, really long — then iterating over that list at extremely high frequencies gets very expensive.  My bad.

And this exacerbated the third issue.  Recall that when the master goes to commit a transaction, it waits for approval from two children.  Normally that happens incredibly fast.  However, when the children started seeing their CPU eaten up by the list iteration, that caused our load to increase substantially — even though it wasn’t doing anything useful.  This had the unfortunate side effect of making the child databases just generally slow down,  meaning it was slow to process messages from peers.  In particular, it meant that the child servers started processing replication commands slower than it would otherwise.

The sum of all three created a vicious cycle: as the child server’s CPU increased, the replication speed decreased, causing the backlog of low-priority command to grow, repeat.

The Workaround

Once we understood this, the first thing we did was disable that cache-update command, then restart all the child databases, and then restart the master.  This cleared the backlog, caused CPU to drop, and caused replication speeds to increase back up to normal.  Problem solved… sorta.

The Quick Solution

However, replication speeds were still too slow.  Replication is highly influenced by network latency.  The latency between our Los Angeles and Santa Clara datacenters is around 10ms.  But between either of those and Las Vegas is 40ms.  It hadn’t always been this way: we’d known that there was some problem that slowed down that link, but it hadn’t been a major problem… until our traffic started going up dramatically in March.  This means that replication has slowed to a point where at peak traffic it can’t keep up.  This causes a backlog of write commands that delays the processing of commands.  (The commands individually are going at full speed, but delayed.)  To mitigate this, we moved the master from Las Vegas to Santa Clara, meaning that it could replicate quickly down to LA (without waiting for the slower Las Vegas link), speeding up replication speeds by about 4x and making all right in the world.

The Long Term Solution

But that’s still not a great solution: our report-caching command is still disabled, and replication speeds are still not where we’d like them.  So we still have work to do:

1. Stop using a list of escalated commands, and replace with a “map” — allowing fast lookup without the CPU problem.
2. Re-enable the report caching command, which will speed up the Reports page.
3. Reduce latency between our datacenters.  This can be done with a dedicated fiber connection, which we’re investigating now.  This will generally increase performance across the board, as well as provide a bigger buffer against temporary replication speed problems.

Conclusion

The final conclusion is that we’re terribly sorry about the delays.  We agonize over every problem encountered by our users, and are always disappointed when something slips through the cracks.  We’ve invested a tremendous amount of time, people, and hard cash into the best possible solution, and we do everything we can to anticipate and prevent any conceivable problem.  But this is complex stuff, and sometimes our best efforts come up short.  Thank you for your patience and I appreciate your understanding as we continue to grow this company by leaps and bounds.

Why use the Custom Method

The custom QuickBooks integration involves using the third party software Transaction Pro Importer made by Baystate Consulting. This software is available for a one-time cost of $199.95. This method creates a true 2-way connection in which accounts that exist in Expensify can be created in QuickBooks. It will allow full customization of the way information captured in Expensify will appear in QuickBooks and is available for both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop.

Some common reasons for wanting to use the custom QuickBooks method:

• You want to export as something other than a check, bill, credit card charge, or general journal entry.
• You need to map the merchant name of expenses in Expensify to vendors in QuickBooks.
• You need to capture class and customer/job at the expense line-item level. This will also require enabling multi-level tagging.
• You want to export as items instead of expenses.
• Any other customization that Expensify’s traditional export method doesn’t handle.

How it Works

You will first create a CSV export format based on the information that you would like to import into QuickBooks. Transaction Pro Importer will let you know the needed information for your given import type (check, bill, etc.). You will then export expense reports to that export format.

You will then import that CSV file to QuickBooks using Transaction Pro Importer.

That’s it! You have now fully customized your QuickBooks integration. For full instructions please visit our custom QuickBooks help page. As always, if you have questions, please don’t hesitate to email us at help@expensify.com.

Prerequisites

These basic company setup steps will need to be taken care of before setting up your Sage 50 integration:

1. Upgrade to the Corporate plan.
2. Create a company expense policy.
3. Ensure that GL codes are asscoiated with Categories.
4. Add Vendor and Job ID as Report Fields.

Configuring Your Export File

After you’ve chosen the appropriate format for your company, you will create an export format that any admin can use to export expense data into Sage 50. To do so, visit the Export format section of your policy (Settings > Policies > [Policy Name] > Export Formats). Once the export format has been created, any policy admin can choose a group of reports and export them to the custom spreadsheet file.

If you have any clarifying questions about your Sage 50 export format, please contact us at help@expensify.com.

First and foremost, we’ve made two HUGE upgrades:

• You now have the ability to fill out Report Fields via both our Android and iPhone apps, rounding out the full submitter experience via mobile.
• We’ve fixed a longstanding and heartbreaking, stuck expense error.

As you’ll probably notice, we also unveiled our new, smoochable design thanks to the hard work of our mobile and design team.

We’re devoted to giving you the best mobile experience possible and to that end we want to hear your feedback. What do you think about the upgrades and would you like to see in our next updates? Let us know at help@expensify.com.

Update your apps to fall in love with Expensify all over again!

Approved: past participle, past tense of ap·prove (Verb) - Officially agree to or accept as satisfactory: “Your expense report has been approved and you will now be reimbursed.”

Approver: (Noun) One who has the authority to approve: “I have submitted my expense report to an approver.”

As an Approver in Expensify you are not restricted to merely “Approving” reports (yay!) or “Rejecting” reports (boo!) based on minor mistakes. Approvers have some pretty substantial abilities when it comes to reports submitted to them. You can change anything in the report EXCEPT merchant name, date, amount of expense or currency.  That means you  DO have the ability to change:

• Expense categories
• Expense tags (including multi-level tagging!)
• Report titles
• Report fields
• Even the Report Policy itself!

Let’s say for example you have an employee, Sally, who keeps on forgetting that she must categorize her expenses within the correct policy before submitting her report.  You don’t want to reject her report or expenses, send it back to her, and risk the potential for hurting her feelings :’(  But you certainly can’t approve it with those violations either…

In come the Approver Super Powers!  You can change the Categories or Tags of her expenses until the report is ready to be approved.

Now doesn’t that report look better? Don’t you feel powerful?  And, no feelings were hurt in the process! If you have any questions about other unknown super powers in Expensify, please contact us at help@expensify.com.

*P.S If you’re concerned about extraneous changes being made to reports by all-powerful approvers, you can enable digital signatures. With this enabled, a PDF of the report will be saved with every report action.

This saves time and hassle, right? THAT SOUNDS LIKE A MYTH TO ME.

Busting the Myth with Expensify

No more losing receipts, no more numbering, and no more playing receipt Tetris at the end of a long day! With our mobile apps and eReceipts, you can report your expenses more quickly and hassle free.

The Expensify App

The Expensify mobile app (available on all major platforms) will allow you to simply snap a picture of your receipt and it will automatically be uploaded to your account.

Bonus buster: If you use our SmartScan feature, you don’t even have to create the expense. Our automated technology will automatically read your receipt and create a corresponding expense for you!

IRS Guaranteed eReceipts

If you import a bank/credit card, you don’t even need to keep the receipt for expenses under $75! We will automatically create an eReceipt that is IRS guaranteed. Automatic expense imports save you time by eliminating the hassels of paper and excel system.

Anymore expense reports myths we can dispel? Email us at help@expensify.com.

If you didn’t make it, you missed:

• Tons of dim sum and sushi
• Milkshake bar (They do exist!)
• RFID check-in/point system for the party developed by one of the university teams

And a photoshop booth manned by our designer, Shawn Borton (immediately below):

Here are some of our favorite products of the photobooth:

Alter ego/Nickname: Bort, Shane Burton, Bortista (for his supreme barista skills)

Hometown: Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania

Roles at Expensify: Chief Photoshop Officer & Part-time Designer

Expensify Start Date: 10:00 AM US PST on September 10, 2012

What is/has been your favorite project to participate on at Expensify?

Refactoring the sign in page. It turned out very well, and the team contributed some really cool images for your sign-ining pleasure.

Life outside of Expensify?

An abysmal chasm of confusion, loneliness, and darkness. (He’s on a pretty bad FIFA losing streak.)

Outside of Expensify and FIFA, you can find him wandering about the city by day, playing soccer by night, and getting $10 haircuts in the Tenderloin bimonthly.

What is your idea of happiness?

A 25 yard knuckler, 20psi of boost in my 1.8T, my Grandma’s meat pie. (Soccer banter, fast cars and Grandma Meola’s fantastic Easter-time dish to the laymen)

What is your idea of misery?

Spending a day with Internet Explorer.

Favorite hero?

My mother Linda – notably for her accomplishment as a back-to-back breast cancer champion.

If you could have a mediocre super power, what would it be?

The ability to untangle headphones with one hand.

How do you want to die?

In exactly the same fashion as General Maximus Decimus Meridius.

What would you look like as a statue of Buddha?

This:

Inspired by his recent trip to South East Asia.

In order to view all receipt pages just open the ‘Edit Expense/Receipt’ window and click the ‘download’ button below the image. This will open the receipt, in its entirety, in another tab in your web browser.

Alternatively, select the ‘Include full page images in PDF’ option on your report before printing a PDF and you’ll be able to view all pages of a receipt in the resulting PDF.

If you have any further multi-page questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at help@expensify.com and we’ll get them smoothed out.

“You have no reason to trust me except that I said you should.”

Nearly everybody in Silicon Valley agrees on how a company is supposed to be run. These are codified into a nebulous set of “best practices” — the pre-packaged advice that is handed out to nearly every startup, in nearly every market, under nearly every set of conditions. But if there’s one thing I’ve come to believe is that “best practices” generally aren’t.

I do a lot of thinking, but I rarely have the chance to share it. Granted, most of that thinking is probably not worth sharing, so you’re not missing much. But I was suggested to share the below advice sent to an entrepreneur friend, who had remarking on how advice received from another entrepreneur made him feel stupid (is that confusing enough)? Here goes:

Also, I’d suggest avoiding hanging out with people who make you feel stupid. It’s possible that you are stupid and they’re brilliant; I’ll grant. But in my experience, I’ve dealt with countless people over the course of my career who made me feel stupid, and history has shown most of them to be idiots. On the other hand, some of the smartest people I’ve come to trust make me feel smart too — they find a way to build upon and improve my ideas, rather than convincing me my ideas are bad and jamming their own ideas down my throat.

As for enterprise versus individual pricing, I think that is a secondary to a far more important question: what is your strategy to acquire customers? If your plan is to advertise your way to growth, then I’d agree: you’re an enterprise company.

That means you should stop trying to sell to individuals or small businesses, and immediately reorient around a strategy of selling to companies with 1000+ employees. (You’ll have a lot smaller than that, but you’ll lose money on them.) Turn off self serve and instead require everybody to just fill out a marketing form. You’ll likely charge what feels like an absurd amount of money per seat, and you’ll need a heavy top-down sales organization to do it. Customers will pay even though most seats will go unused, and you’ll laugh at their folly. You’ll likely have a classic top-down sales structure: a marketing team that generates “marketing qualified leads (MQL)”, handed to a sales team that has a front-line group of people who just qualify the MQL’s into “sales qualified leads (SQL)” by confirming they have the “BANT” (Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing). You’ll probably sell custom-negotiated annual contracts, sold by a salesperson making a 15% commission on first year’s revenue. Then it’ll be handed over to an account manager who is bonused by reducing churn. You’ll need to get your metrics dialed in pretty early, demonstrate that your CCA>LTV, then raise a ton of money and spend it immediately, then go raise more. It’ll have a pretty heavy management structure — VPs for everything as early as possible, each running a large, aggressive organization underneath it — something like 30% marketing, 50% sales, 20% engineering. The sales team will be super aggressive with huge quotas with minimal base and large commission, but it’ll be hard to hit so you’ll have maybe 30% annual churn, in a boilerroom setup.

Some variation on this is basically how every top-down enterprise company sells. They don’t always start out this way, but they usually end up this way. This is the best practice for a silicon valley startup: it’s what everyone tries to do. It’s what everyone will tell you to do.

It works about 5% of the time.

Remember, 95% of all startups utterly fail. No return to any investors. That’s why VCs have a portfolio theory: they invest in 20 companies with the expectation that 1 will pan out. They really don’t care which one — they have no particular reason to hope that you succeed over the other 19 companies. They just push them all as hard as they can, knowing that 19 will fail, and 1 won’t.

The thing is, as an entrepreneur, you don’t have a portfolio. You have 1 company. And are you sure you want to bet your whole company on a strategy that has a 95% failure rate?

To be clear, I don’t know that any other plan has a higher success rate. But I don’t know that other strategies necessarily have a *worse* failure rate either. I’ll also say that other strategies are a lot more fun and satisfying, and provide a better balance of risk/reward. (Though “better” is a judgement call: if you have it in you to pump and dump and endless array of startups, each 1-2 years in the making, than the former strategy is perhaps better. But if you want to build a company that users rave about, with people you like and hope to work with for a long time, while enjoying life outside work — you might consider alternatives.)

Furthermore, I will say that most of the truly great companies didn’t follow the above plan. Salesforce didn’t. They do now, of course, but when they started, they were all activity-based pricing and self signup in the SMB — up to something like $14M in revenue — retreating upmarket because churn was high and they couldn’t raise money after 9/11 to weather the storm and thus focused on moving upmarket as fast as possible to address cashflow concerns, essentially abandoning their SMB roots in the process. Concur — our ostensible competitor — was the same, layering on enterprise sales *after* succeeding in the SMB (and eventually leaving it behind entirely). Intuit — our *real* competitor — never did this. DropBox didn’t do it this way, and Box.net didn’t start this way (they were forced to go enterprise after DropBox dominated the individual and SMB — Box’s current business model is Plan B). Yammer does it this way now, but didn’t at the start: they got their start with viral in the SMB, but found their product only really provided value in a large company.

A good story you might investigate is BetterWorks. They bet the whole company on the above model. They had marquis investors, founders with near celebrity status. They were the darlings of “Silicon Beach” in San Diego — a pillar of that entrepreneurial community. They had amazing design, hired fantastic people, executed with extreme aggression. They raised $10M. Read this upbeat coverage: http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/13/betterworks/ Wouldn’t you want your startup to be regarded as highly? But then read this, just *eight months later* http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/24/betterworks-shuts-down/

My only point is: nobody knows what is going to work, and anybody who claims otherwise is an idiot — especially if they make you feel stupid for believing them. At the end of the day, you’re in this because you feel you’re smarter than the next guy. But that’s only true if you stop listening to the next guy, and start listening to yourself.

Signs and Symptoms that you may be in the wrong policy:

• As a policy admin, you cannot see reports that your employees have submitted
• Categories and tags are incorrect
• You are asked to submit to the wrong individual
• There are report violations that don’t apply to your desired policy

Changing your Report’s Policy

Chances are, you are operating under the wrong policy. Don’t fret! All you need to do is toggle to a different policy in the upper right hand corner of your report.

Setting your Primary Policy

Different policies are designed to apply to different departments, teams, or subsidiaries, but naturally one individual may fall into multiple categories. There is no extra cost for having multiple policies so go wild! You can even designate a specific policy as your Primary Policy. You will see a list of all of the policies that you are a part of by clicking Settings > Policies. Your Primary Policy will be highlighted in yellow.

You can easily set a different policy as your Primary Policy by simply toggling in the top right corner. The change will be reflected in the newly highlighted policy depicting your primary policy.

Crisis averted!… you’re welcome.