Expensify Blog

Expensify’s new setup wizard for Google Apps hosted companies

Zhenya Grinshteyn — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 14:00:37 +0000

It’s been almost 5 full months since we launched our expense reports that don’t suck in the Google Apps Marketplace. During that time we’ve received a lot of great feedback from many of the new companies that came to us from the Marketplace (Welcome everyone!). From that feedback we’ve designed a setup wizard that breaks down the install process into simple, manageable steps and eases the transition for your company to use our app for your expense report management.

The wizard only shows the information most relevant and automatically adjusts to your needs to take the time and hassle out of setting up a company. The changes run deep under the hood, but the most notable differences are outlined below.

Sync with your company’s employee email list

Sync your company email list to make sure everyone gets an Expensify account when you add us to your universal navigation bar. Syncing with your email list also lets us automatically keep your expense policy up to date with new hires, reducing the time and overhead spent on expanding your workforce. Use the drop downs next to each name to create an approval tree for all submitted expenses. Once the wizard is complete, we’ll create accounts for your employees and send out a brief welcome email with some tips to get started.

Share administrator privileges with an accountant

Give your accountant access to the expense policy. They’ll be able to make updates and set up the sync with QuickBooks to pull in your company’s chart of expense accounts. Use the synced account list to auto-categorize transaction types and save your employees’ time when they create their expense reports as well as increase the submission rate of correctly formatted reports.

Not using QuickBooks? Create your own expense categories!

Central billing

Learn about our pricing and set up a billing credit card for your company’s use of Expensify. Remember, it’s free for your company to receive expense reports from up to 2 people each month so you can skip this step and jump right in to an unlimited free trial. When you’re ready to switch your entire company on to Expensify we’ll show our pricing again and prompt for you to enter a billing credit card.

Read more about our app in the Google Apps Marketplace with the link below!

Need help setting up your company to use Expensify? Check out our step-by-step tutorial here

Expensify personally delivers your expense reports into the cloud

Zhenya Grinshteyn — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 16:00:10 +0000

How many times have you heard “cloud this” or “cloud that” but were never sure of where your stuff actually was in this “cloud”? Well, at Expensify we got fed up with giving people a roundabout answer about which one was our cloud and where your expense reports are going. This past weekend Zhenya and Witold took some time off from providing phone support and monitoring servers to hand pick and deliver your expense reports in to the cloud.

A cherry picker wasn’t tall enough and the clouds of smoke around San Francisco weren’t the clouds we were looking for. Already, picking a cloud seemed way more difficult than initially thought. Not to be discouraged, we set our sights outside of San Francisco. After several hours of driving, we’d finally found a cloud we liked.

Hovering right above Mt. Shasta, our very own expense cloud looked so soft and pure, yet menacing enough to ward off any potential threats to the security of your expenses. Making haste to get your expense reports moved in to their cloud, we geared up and proceeded on our quest.

Having only stopped to put a fresh Clif bar in our stomachs and water to wash away the thirst, we made our way through the tree line and emerged on to the lower part of Avalanche Gulch.

Feeling good from the thinning air, we kept on our way up, winding along the narrowing gully…

…until we reached a plateau: Helen Lake, a place to rest and relax for the night. Tired from the last push, we lounged around where the sun peeked through the cloud (and got quite a tan!) to give our legs a much needed break. A packet of chicken and rice mixed with boiling water did the trick to bring back our strength and regain our confidence in the mission at hand. As we set up our neon yellow home for the night, all we could think about was the next part of the climb, and more hot food.

It’s morning. 5 AM to be precise. It’s also cold, but not nearly as cold as it should be for all of the snow surrounding us. Despite the differences in scenery, the next day of cloud searching began much like any other day: with breakfast. A boiling pot of Gatorade mix and a blueberry crisp Clif bar sets us straight as we begin our move in to the cloud.

Just mere meters below the cloud, you can really see the excitement burning Wito’s lungs as he comes ever closer to announcing…

“It’s official! “

“Your expense reports are in the cloud.”

The glee and glory soon faded as our thoughts turned to the future. What about when we get more people using our apps? What happens when we expand and need a bigger cloud? Well, what a perfect spot for us to be in. It just so happened that the summit was staring down at us, several hundred meters in the distance. Surely up there we would have enough room to host a bigger cloud when the need arose.

Refueling from now frozen chocolate chip Clif bars and icy water, safe and secure in the knowledge that we’d got at least a little cloud space to tide us over, the push to the summit seemed easy. We clambered up the last bit of ice, snaked over a sulfur spring and made the last steps to wind around a cluster of rocks to set foot on the very tip top of Mt. Shasta.

Finally, looking down at our expense cloud below, we knew that our mission was a success. Overcoming hurdles (and a lot of icy rocks), we had come out on top ensuring that we have enough cloud space to handle our growth.

As of this writing, we are the first and only expense reporting solution with tangible proof of being in the cloud. Where else do you get that kind of authenticity and dedication?

The War is Growing Against Suck.

David Barrett — Wed, 26 May 2010 02:48:04 +0000

When we launched “Expense reports that don’t suck!” in September 2008, the tagline was pretty controversial. Half the responses cheered us on, and the other half thought we were idiots. Well nothing calms nerves like good company, one of who is none other than GE (yes, that GE):

When I first saw that I thought, “surely it’s a coincidence, they couldn’t really be copying Expensify… right?” Then the other day TechCrunch posted a story about “A Bank that Doesn’t Suck”:

Ok, that’s starting to get close, but still. Probably a coincidence. And then today:

I think I see a trend. But you know, it’s a good trend. It doesn’t matter if they’re copying us. What matters is we’re brothers in arms, waging a global, multi-industry battle against Suck. Welcome to the fight.

7-person, funded, early-stage startup needs you! (junior coder)

David Barrett — Sat, 22 May 2010 01:30:16 +0000

Perfect for new college grads or people who are bored with school and want to get started in the real world!

Hello, my name is David Barrett and I’m the CEO of Expensify. We do “expense reports that don’t suck!” (Google “expensify” to read more.) We’re getting crushed under an ever-growing pile of super awesome work, and I need one bright soul to help us dig our way out. I can guarantee you fun, an amazing opportunity to learn, and the siren’s call of distant riches. But only if you are *all* of the following:

An incredibly hard worker, even when it’s not so fun. There is a ton of work to do, and a lot of it downright sucks. After all — we do the sucky work so our customers won’t need to. I need you to buck up and grind through server logs, user emails, source code, and bug reports, without complaint or supervision, and come back asking for more.
A cool person to be with. Not a crazy party animal, just someone we can trust, rely upon, hang out with, bounce ideas off of, and generally interact with in a positive way, both personally and professionally. In fact, this is one of the most stringent requirements we have: would you be fun to hang out with day and night on some remote, exotic beach? This isn’t a rhetorical question, either: every year we take the company overseas for a month (on your own dime, sorry) and work incredibly hard while having a ton of fun. We’ve done Thailand, Mexico, India, and Turkey. Where do you want to go this year?
Super talented, in a general way. We’re going to throw a ton of work at you of every possible sort, and you need that magic skill of being able to figure it out even if you have no idea where to start. On any given day you might bounce between super low-level coding, super high-level technical support, updating our user documentation, inventing/designing/building some new feature, etc. This is not a code monkey job — you’re going to be a full participant in the process, and you need to bring your own unique blend of skills to the table.
Specifically talented in a programming way. You can instantly visualize solutions to problems big and small. Your code is always clean, well commented, has good nomenclature and indentation. You can switch on a dime between C++, PHP, Bash, Cron, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, Dwoo — not because you know them all, but because you’re the sort of person who can just pick it up and figure it out. If you’re this sort of person, you’ll know what I mean. If not, then this position isn’t for you.

And there are a bunch more, but odds are if you got this far, nothing I can do would stop you from applying. That’s a problem because while I know *you* are awesome, it’s actually really hard and time consuming to find you in the midst of the literally hundreds of other applications I get from everyone else. So this is where I’m going to ask my first favor: can you make it *really easy* and obvious how great you are, so I don’t accidentally overlook you?

There are probably many ways to do that. But the easiest way is to help me out by answering the following questions:

What’s the URL of your website? If you don’t have one, stop now — please save us both the time by not applying.
When did you start programming? Tell me about your first project, what technologies you used, and why you did it.
Why do you do it? Why programming instead of all the other exciting careers out there?
What was your last/current job, what was/is your total compensation package, and why did you / do you want to leave? Can I have the name and phone number of your last manager? It’s cool if you left on bad terms — I got fired from my last job, after all — just tell me the story.
If you were rich, what would you do, and why?

Without doing any research or asking any friends, what language is each of the following code fragments, and what’s wrong with each (if anything)?

   .centered { text-align: center; vertical-align: center; }

   tail /var/log/syslog | grep warn

   char* data[] = { "foo", "bar", 0 };
   int strlenSum = 0;
   do { strlenSum += strlen( *data ); } while( data++ );

   The time is  o'clock.

   var a, b = { c: "d" };
   alert( a.c );

What’s the biggest, coolest project you ever built from top-to-bottom? Not a component; a whole self-sufficient thing.
What’s a salary and equity cut that excites you? Like, truly feels “wow, I’m being valued”. What’s the minimum you’d take? Don’t skimp on the question: it’s gnarly, I know. But let’s just get it out in the open, up front.
Why do you want to work at Expensify, specifically? Not something general about startups overall; what is it about us in particular that interests you?
What’s the catch? Everybody has strings attached — you’ve got something you need to finish first, some big vacation commitment coming up, some particular fear you need addressed or requirement you need satisfied. It’s fine. But what is it?

Please send your answers to dbarrett@expensify.com. If you make an honest attempt at answering the questions above, I promise I’ll respond personally — hopefully in a timely fashion, but definitely sometime.

Thanks. I’m genuinely excited to hear from you. I know there’s someone out there who will be a perfect fit for our team. I really hope it’s you, and I appreciate your help in patience while we figure that out together. Thanks!

Take control of your business expenses with our analytics tool

Zhenya Grinshteyn — Tue, 11 May 2010 21:20:57 +0000

Update: This analytics feature was picked as the Finovate 2010 “Best in Show”!!

To date, all of our features and integrations have saved contractors, employees, bookkeepers and accountants countless hours and many a headache in getting expenses organized. But what about the managers, the people approving and reimbursing expenses? Well, today is their day!

We’ve just added a powerful addition to our web app: a complete analytics package to track and review spending in varying levels of detail. With a single click, Expensify analytics populates your employee’s expense reports into clear charts and graphs, allowing you, the decision-maker, to better manage your resources, budget and team. All reported and unreported expenses can be viewed and analyzed by employee, by date, and by expense category. Each of these can then be broken down even further to show daily, monthly, or yearly totals for spending.

A chart of daily spending pinpoints spikes in consumption

Our free analytics tool will help you to spot excess spending, curb over consumption, and gain insight in to your operating costs. Sign in to your account on our site, head over to the Expenses tab and see your employee and contractor spending in an entirely new way!

Intuit picks us to help organize your business expenses!

Zhenya Grinshteyn — Thu, 06 May 2010 14:30:33 +0000

Exciting news, our friends at Intuit have picked us through the Intuit Partner Platform to be a part of the “Get Organized, Get Rewarded” promotion with MyFax and OfficeDrop. Get rewarded for using Expensify by signing up your company through the Intuit Workplace App Center.

Sign up your entire company to use Expensify through the Intuit Workplace App Center, and keep using us to track your business spending and create expense reports that don’t suck for 6 months. If you do, Intuit will reimburse your company for the first 3 months of using our service!

Wondering about our pricing? Use us for free to create and submit expense reports! When more than 2 people submit an expense report for approval and reimbursement, we’re only $5/submitter per month with the first 2 submitters free. More details about our pricing is at https://www.expensify.com/content/help/price.

Create your entire expense report on the iPhone!

Zhenya Grinshteyn — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 18:00:13 +0000

Our mobile expense report app for the iPhone just got stronger, better, and faster (but remains free)!
Download your copy of our expense app version 2.0 here or find it by searching for “Expensify” in the app store.

What does the app do?

Import expenses from your credit card or bank account
Log and track your mileage
Manage all of your expenses and receipts, offline!
- Snap pictures and upload receipt images to your account
- Log cash expenses right as they are incurred
Create and submit an entire expense report from anywhere!
- Add and categorize expenses,
- Attach receipts, and
- Send it off for reimbursement!

We’ve improved the functions of adding cash expenses and scanning receipt images to work offline. The next time you load the app with an internet connection, all of the added receipts and expenses will be uploaded to your account in the background, giving you the freedom to keep doing what you were doing.

In addition to capturing receipt images and adding cash expenses, the app now lets you manage and sort all of your expenses to create and submit an entire expense report right from your phone.

Download and install your copy of the Expensify iPhone mobile expense report app from the link or by going to the iPhone app store and searching for “Expensify”.

Now, with more banks!

Zhenya Grinshteyn — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:07:42 +0000

Our engineers have been working away at increasing the amount of supported banks for importing expenses. Today bears the fruit of their labor as a large addition of supported banks, covering the vast majority of all banks and credit card issuers in the US. For the curious, the full list of supported banks is at the very end of this post. If you’ve had to use OFX/QFX upload or gave up because you couldn’t import your expenses directly, now is the time to connect your bank!

Search for and select the bank from which to import expenses

Just start typing the name of your bank, and we’ll show you all matching results. Select your bank, and proceed to import your expenses from that account.

We’re still adding more banks and we need people to be part of a beta test. If you have an account with any of the banks below and would like it to be supported, email Nate, our bank maestro, and he’ll work with you to get your expenses imported.

The full list of supported banks is below:

6-person startup is taking off and needs you! (junior web designer)

David Barrett — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 20:04:26 +0000

Update: The position has been filled. Thank you to all applicants!

Perfect for new college grads or people who are bored with school and want to get started in the real world!

Hello, my name is David Barrett and I’m the CEO of Expensify. We do “expense reports that don’t suck!” (Google “expensify” to read more.) We’re getting crushed under an ever-growing pile of super awesome work, and I need one more bright soul to help us dig our way out. I can guarantee you fun, an amazing opportunity to learn, and the siren’s call of distant riches. But only if you are *all* of the following:

An incredibly hard worker, even when it’s not so fun. There is a ton of work to do, and a lot of it downright sucks. After all — we do the sucky work so our customers won’t need to. I need you to buck up and grind through div, spans, tables and more, without complaint or supervision, and come back asking for more.
A cool person to be with. Not a crazy party animal, just someone we can trust, rely upon, hang out with, bounce ideas off of, and generally interact with in a positive way, both personally and professionally. In fact, this is one of the most stringent requirements we have: would you be fun to hang out with day and night on some remote, exotic beach? This isn’t a rhetorical question, either: every year we take the company overseas for a month (on your own dime, sorry) and work incredibly hard while having a ton of fun. We’ve done Thailand, Mexico, India, and Turkey. Where do you want to go this year?
Super talented, in a general way. We’re going to throw a ton of work at you of every possible sort, and you need that magic skill of being able to figure it out even if you have no idea where to start. On any given day you might bounce between super low-level CSS tweaks, super high-level technical support, updating our user documentation, inventing/designing/building some new feature, etc. This might be a junior role, but you’re going to be a full participant in the process, and you need to bring your own unique blend of skills to the table.
Specifically talented in a design way. You make clean, professional designs that steal the best ideas and make them better. You have a natural eye for soothing, cheerful colors, and can find or create color palettes that reinforce the appropriate emotions. You code solid, cross-browser HTML and CSS, and are capable of diving into and cleaning up an existing design without insisting upon a massive from-scratch redesign from day one. You know the best places to find fonts, icons, stock art, color palettes, and design inspiration — and you know when to create anew versus stick with the basics. But overall, you have the chops to take our site and page by page, div by div, make it look a little bit better every day.

There are probably many ways to do that. But the easiest way is to help me out by answering the following questions:

What’s the URL of your website? If you don’t have one, stop now — please save us both the time by not applying.
When did you start designing? Tell me about your first project, what techniques you used, etc.
Why do you do it? Why web design instead of all the other exciting careers out there?
What was your last/current job, what was/is your total compensation package, and why did you / do you want to leave? Can I have the name and phone number of your last manager? It’s cool if you left on bad terms — I got fired from my last job, after all — just tell me the story.
If you were rich, what would you do, and why?

Without doing any research or asking any friends, what does each of the following do, and what’s wrong with each (if anything)?

   .centered { text-align: center; vertical-align: center; }

   body > table > td { border: 1px dashed light-green; }

   input[type='text'] { font-size: 1em; }

   .li { list-style: disc left; }

   .lotsOfDivs #childdiv { font-weight: italic; }

   .warning { font-color: #00FF00; }

    #parentDiv { position: relative; }
    #parentDiv .childDiv { float: right; }

What’s the biggest, coolest project you ever designed from top-to-bottom? Not a component; a whole self-sufficient thing.
What’s a salary and equity cut that excites you? Like, truly feels “wow, I’m being valued”. What’s the minimum you’d take? Don’t skimp on the question: it’s gnarly, I know. But let’s just get it out in the open, up front.
Why do you want to work at Expensify, specifically? Not something general about startups overall; what is it about us in particular that interests you?
What’s the catch? Everybody has strings attached — you’ve got something you need to finish first, some big vacation commitment coming up, some particular fear you need addressed or requirement you need satisfied. It’s fine. But what is it?

David Barrett

Founder and CEO of Expensify

Follow us at http://twitter.com/expensify

Personal blog: http://quinthar.com

Company blog: http://blog.expensify.com

Recent coverage: http://is.gd/b0MuV

Expensify Blog

Expensify’s new setup wizard for Google Apps hosted companies

Sync with your company’s employee email list

Share administrator privileges with an accountant

Central billing

Expensify personally delivers your expense reports into the cloud

The War is Growing Against Suck.

7-person, funded, early-stage startup needs you! (junior coder)

Take control of your business expenses with our analytics tool

Intuit picks us to help organize your business expenses!

Create your entire expense report on the iPhone!

Now, with more banks!

Top 10 Tips to Be Tax Ready Next Year

6-person startup is taking off and needs you! (junior web designer)