Automatic Statement Reporting is a domain control feature that auto-creates and auto-populates a report with expenses for an assigned credit card in a given statement period. In other words, Expensify automatically places posted credit card transactions in an expense report for your employees who use corporate cards!

Some highlights of this feature include:

• Admins can create statement period expense reports for employees with assigned company credit cards
• Employees can continuously populate the expense report with posted credit card expenses
• A reminder email is sent to employees at the end of the statement period with the expense report, ready to be looked over by the employee before submitting to the administrator

If you’re as excited about this feature as we are, hop on over to our help page to get set up. As always, we love to get your feedback! If you have any questions just post a comment below or email help@expensify.com.

“In Croatia, we would have dinner parties and I would plug in my iPod and sing for an hour or two. It is in that private, intimate atmosphere where you feel like you’re making a connection to the people in the audience—the music comes from a deeper place, less technical and more emotional, and you can hear that. In that moment, it’s about a thing you cannot touch but you can feel it and hear it.

My favorite song to sing is ‘For Good’ from Wicked. It’s about meeting people in your life and what they learn from you and what you learn from them—how people change you. I sang that song in my last concert at my music school before I came to San Francisco.

For me, singing is something that taps into your emotions. You purge yourself of the problems you’re dealing with. Music is this incredible, big part of me that honestly I haven’t done enough lately, and you know, it’s that thing that makes me feel so good.

Forget love, forget men, forget chocolate. Nothing makes me feel as good as I do when I sing.”

— Korina, 25, Zagreb, Croatia – People Team Intern

Expensify is more than a company, we are family. We come from 5 different countries and 6 different time zones, and we all connect for one reason — to get shit done, together.

Per Diem limits will allow you to set category-specific limits for expenses in reports. So for instance, if you have a company policy where you only reimburse $60 of meals per-day, you can now set that! Per Diem will save you time and make it a lot easier to manage these daily expense limits to ensure that expenses are staying within the set budget.

Take a look at the video below for more information on setting up Per Diem rates for your policies, and to see how the rule works from the submitter’s point-of-view.

As always, we love to get your feedback! If you have any questions just post a comment below or email help@expensify.com.

To configure SSO, navigate to the SAML section of your Domain Control settings. You’ll be able to set whether you want to make SAML optional or required.

Once it has been enabled, your employees will be able to sign in via SAML both from the website and mobile app.

We hope SAML will make it easier for employees to log into Expensify, while allowing companies to have more control over passwords and access to the system. Happy SAML-ing!

For more information on how to set this up from your company visit our SAML help page. If you have any questions or want to sign up for a free trial, feel free to write to us at help@expensify.com!

The team spent months rethinking the mobile experience and the result is a beautiful interface with more intuitive design that makes the process of snapping photos of receipts and submitting reports easier than ever. A few things to highlight about the new design are the Expenses tab as the new home screen, the Launcher, the seamless tab bar and general refreshes all around.

1. Expenses tab as the new home screen

             
                  Out with the old….                                                    …and in with the new!

 When you opened the Expensify app in the previous version, we took you to the Create Expense screen, which was really a dashboard of sorts. However, from user research and feedback, we realized that the Expenses tab is the most commonly accessed tab. As a result, we changed the home screen to reflect user behavior, saving you an extra tap.

2. The Launcher

Our new Launcher!

With the new home screen, we also made it easier to create a new expense. Simply click on the Launcher, that green plus button at the bottom of the screen, and you’ll be able to easily create an expense by tracking distance, SmartScanning, manually adding an expense, or by tracking time. This new layout not only makes it easy to create an expense, but it looks great as well.

3. New tab bar

We created a universally accessible, updated tab bar at the bottom of the home screen to help save you time on every expense you create. Now, you can go directly from Expenses to Reports to Trips, all in one tap. Talk about seamless navigation throughout the app!

4. Visual refresh

           
Old user interface                                                   New user interface

With the new mobile updates also comes a visual refresh. As an example, check out the Reports page. By making the text easier to read and adding in other contextual elements of reports, such as whether a Reimbursed report is “Confirmed” (i.e. the money has arrived) and whether an Open report was Rejected, we’re making it easier than ever for users to quickly see the status of their report with these new embellishments.

With every new change to the app, we’re making expense reporting on the go faster, easier, and more efficient for the end user than ever before. With a ton of new features and improvements lined up this year, the new mobile home screen is just the tip of the iceberg.

Tell us what you think about the new mobile home screen in the comments below. If you have any questions or want to sign up for a free trial, feel free to write to us at help@expensify.com!

Our shiny new policy editor!

Enter the re-designed policy editor. It’s got a cleaner design, and specifically re-organizes the expense and report rules and information into more sensible sections. We’ve also given greater visibility to the Report Titles feature, which allows you to set automatic titles for reports on policies. Check out the video below to see how it works:

As always, props to Shawn and Leanne on the design team for leading this and making things simpler for policy admins.

We love to get your feedback! If you have any questions just post a comment below or email help@expensify.com. 

In Part 1, I talked about the different sources of tax season pain such as stress, tension, and anxiety. This pain is compounded by our attempt to avoid the pain by procrastinating, which only serves to add more pain to the process of getting our taxes filed.

The good news is, it’s possible to break the tax pain cycle using the system outlined below. How do you get started? Simply follow these five manageable steps outlined below.

1. Start Early

Start early to avoid the stress of tax season

The longer you wait to do your taxes, the longer the tax pain has to build. Starting early on your taxes prevents the tax pain from building to increasingly uncomfortable levels; the trick is actually doing it.

To Do: Use a tool like Evernote to create a single and well-organized digital storage location for all of your tax documents.

2. Divide the Process Into Small, Manageable Pieces

Instead of trying to collect your tax information all at once, create a system that helps you stay on top of your paperwork one step at a time. By implementing the Tax Pain Relief system and adding your relevant tax information to it throughout the year, most of the information you need to file will already be waiting for you in your centralized digital repository once filing season rolls around

To Do: Create a central repository that lets you deposit relevant information (taxes, receipts, etc) as soon as you get it. This will help prevent a last-minute scramble in April that will ultimately increase your stress and anxiety to another level.

3. Maintain an Organized System

File cabinets are obsolete.

The single digital storage location you set up is a self-organizing system for keeping track of your tax records throughout the year. If you are a business owner, I recommend separating your personal tax records from business tax records.

To Do: If you have multiple businesses, keep the tax records for each of your businesses separated as well. Setting-up individual notebooks in Evernote works very well for this purpose. In addition, use Expensify to generate expense reports and receipts, then add those reports and receipts to your centralized repository (take a look at Natalie’s post here for some additional advice on keeping things simple by only collecting the receipts you need and ditching those you don’t). A system like FileThis allows you to do the same with financial statements.

4. Keep Good Records

Small business expert Denise O’Berry emphasizes that keeping good records is essential. She says, “Right along with being prepared is keeping good records. Keeping your records organized and exact on a daily basis helps keep you from stressing over the deductions you have been missing.”

To Do: Use the Evernote mobile app to easily create photo notes documenting your charitable donations, e.g. clothing, throughout the year. Additionally, integrating Expensify and FileThis into your system makes it easy to find and access your tax filings, such as receipts and financial statements, all in one place.

5. Prepare All Necessary Tax Documents

One of the most important aspects of taking the pain out of tax filing is making sure you have collected all the documents you need to complete the required tax forms. Knowing that you haven’t overlooked a key piece of information gives you the confidence that you’re much less likely to make costly mistakes when it comes to completing your tax returns. There are a number of lists available to help you understand what documents you need to file your taxes.

To Do: Add a checklist to an Evernote note and review the information you’ve collected in your tax notebook(s) through the year. Speaking from personal experience, this approach is a lot easier than trying to collect all the information at once and check-off your list of required documents at the same time.

Breaking the Tax Pain Cycle

Congratulations! By reading this post, you’re already on the road toward breaking the tax pain cycle! The next step in experiencing tax pain relief this year and for years to come is to setup the system for yourself. Remember, the system can’t work for you if you don’t put it in place and use it throughout the year.

The simplicity of this system was the key in helping me overcoming my strong tendencies to procrastinate doing my taxes, which caused me unnecessary pain tax season after tax season, year after year. I hope it will do the same for you. Keep an eye out for Part 3 of the series, where I’ll discuss how to use your Tax Pain Relief at tax time. Be sure not to miss it, because this is where you’ll experience the real power of the system!

About the Author:

Chris understands the stress and pain that comes with collecting various tax forms, bank statements, and receipts. To combat this issue, he developed Tax Pain Relief to make the tax information collection process a lot easier and better for himself. It works so well that he has since decided to share the process with others to help them get their tax lives organized, once and for all!

What Does This All Mean?

Manufacturing companies seeking a first class expense and receipt management solution can now seamlessly integrate Expensify with their Infor VISUAL back-end. 

“Many of our VISUAL ERP customers have sales teams and/or field service reps that currently spend many hours per week submitting expenses. Then the financial team has to spend many additional hours approving them and manually entering them into VISUAL,” said Paul Tedford, Business Solutions Manager of Synergy Resources. “With Expensify for VISUAL, we turn these hours/days into minutes saving our customers from errors, dollars, and time.”

How Does the Connector Make My Expense Reports Suck Less?

The Expensify Infor VISUAL connector allows companies to export approved Expensify expense reports using a module within Infor VISUAL. Gone are the days of moving spreadsheets files from one system to another. Synergy has developed a system where Infor VISUAL companies’ end-users create, submit, and approve expenses using Expensify’s SmartScan, mobile apps and approval workflow features. Once expenses are approved, the work in Expensify is complete. Company administrators then navigate to VISUAL, where they can pull in approved reports, based on a date range, and assign them to specific accounts in their system of record.

Awesome backend magic of the connector pulling approved reports from Expensify into Infor VISUAL!

Synergy developed the Infor VISUAL Connector with Expensify to meet the expense management needs of businesses in highly specialized industries, such a manufacturing, aerospace and energy. “The Expensify solution truly does take the hassle out of submitting expense reports and processing them for any VISUAL customer in any industry, we look forward to seeing the results our customers experience due to this partnership,” said Tedford.

To learn more about the Expensify Infor VISUAL Connector and working with Synergy Resources, write to opportunities@synergyresources.net.

We love collaborating with innovative companies! To learn more about partnering with Expensify, reach out to us at use.expensify.com/consultants. 

About Synergy:

Founded in 1992, Synergy Resources is dedicated to delivering solutions to the industrial manufacturing and distribution sector and is focused solely on the Infor ERP VISUAL™ product line. Our staff members are highly experienced individuals who have practical experience working in manufacturing, financial, and technical roles within the industrial business world.  Each of our implementation teams includes a dedicated specialist in each of these disciplines to ensure our customers are provided with the best possible business and product knowledge. Synergy Resources has helped over 800 manufacturing and distribution companies improve their operational performance and increase profitability. Learn how Synergy Resources can help your organization achieve improved results by visiting our website at: http://www.synergyresources.net

Running a business often requires making some tough decisions. And the decisions only get tougher when they impact your bottom line.

Fortunately an accountant will help during these times. Many people believe they are limited to doing the books and preparing tax returns, but an accountant can help you with so much more.

They can advise you on the best course of action of your business, based on their expertise and a deep understanding of your finances. Here are some common situations small businesses face where it makes sense to hire an accountant: 

1. When you have to deal with the government

Paying taxes and other interactions with the government can be scary and stressful. There are lots of complicated laws and regulations that must followed to a tee, even though they can be difficult to understand.

Accountants are experts in these situations. They can make sure you satisfy any government requirements in the most beneficial way for your business. Take preparing your tax return, for example. A good accountant makes sure your tax obligations are met, while saving you as much money as possible. 

2. When you get audited

Audits are rare but they can be very problematic when they do occur. If it happens to you but you’re not yet working with an accountant, you’ll need to hire one. They can get things back on track and prevent another audit from occurring, especially since the government will be watching closely.

All that being said, you shouldn’t wait until an audit arises before you hire an accountant. Most can prevent one from ever happening in the first place. And many offer audit insurance – meaning most your fees will be covered if an audit does occur.

3. When you’re applying for a loan

Having an accountant on your team can be a big advantage when you’re applying for a business loan. Banks lend to businesses they’re confident will repay them and working with an accountant shows you’re serious about succeeding.

An accountant can also help prepare your loan application. They can use your financial data to generate revenue projections and expense reports to present to the lender. It shows you understand your cashflow and have a plan to repay the loan.

4. When your business is growing

Growth is exciting when you own a business but it’s not always easy to handle. An accountant can provide guidance as your business matures – much like a CFO does in a large company.

Growth usually requires making strategic decisions like hiring new employees, taking on new office space or expanding your service/product offering. Your accountant will come to understand your finances better than anyone and can advise when it’s the right time to make these moves.

5. When you’re considering buying or selling a business

Your accountant can essentially act as your agent when you’re buying or selling a business.  If you’re looking to buy, they can review the company’s finances and let you know if it’s a sound investment.

The same goes for when you decide to sell. Your accountant can prepare financial reports for prospective buyers and make sure you get the best value for your business.

There are a lot of hidden responsibilities that come with running a business, and they can often be far outside the scope of what your business actually does. An accountant can take many of these responsibilities off your plate so you can focus on what you do best. If you’re interested in learning more about the advantages of working with an accountant, check out Xero’s guide “When to hire an accountant.”

Dave Anderson is an inbound marketing specialist for Xero – an accounting software provider and Expensify integration partner. Originally from New England, he now lives in San Francisco where he enjoys good food, great coffee and following his hometown team, the Red Sox. 

When I was a child, my mom collected shoeboxes. Big boxes, tall boxes, small boxes, etc. Their varying sizes made them a great storage option.

My parents own a slew of vending machines in and around my hometown and keeping track of their expenses during the year was never a huge priority. As a result, my mom finds the best-priced soda at one store then travels to the next, even if it’s only because she has a coupon for potato chips. She had receipts from Sam’s Club (a retail warehouse), gas stations, grocery stores, and more. It’s a lot of driving and even more receipts.

As spring would roll around, the whole family piled in the van (each carrying a shoebox) and made our way to the tax man’s (a close family friend) house. Here, we had a blast. The weather was getting warmer and days, a little longer. My siblings and I would jump on their trampoline, hang out in the hot tub, and run around the yard for hours. As the sun set, I was ready to go home. What was taking SO long?!

What I didn’t know was that those shoeboxes were filled with receipts and my parents’ accountant had the never-ending task of itemizing each one. Not only that, but add in vehicle mileage calculation and you have yourself a full day nightmare.

Accountants Are People Too

As tax season approaches, it is important to remember the relationship with your accountant is an important one. Showing up with shoeboxes full of receipts is one of the worst things you can do.

So if you’re one of the thousands of people who haven’t done a single thing to prepare your records for your accountant, there is still hope. Although, it might be too late this year, we can offer a few words of advice for next year.

1. Out With the Old
   The least you can do for your accountant is to sort through your own receipts and ditch the ones you know don’t pertain to the current tax season. Hold onto everything that should be included for next year and shred the rest.
2. Home Office Expenses
   Most people forget to keep track of expenses inside their home, but if you’re regularly meeting clients there, you can claim certain expenses. For example, utilities, repairs, insurance, and maintenance are all expenses that you should keep track of. By creating a report in the Expensify app directly associated with your home office expenses, you can itemize bills each month. Each bill you receive can be tracked on the report and easily exported for your accountant at the end of the year.
3. Mileage
   If you own a car and use it for business purposes, keeping track of mileage is very important. You can calculate operating costs by taking the sum of your loan interest, lease costs, gas, repairs, maintenance, and insurance and dividing it by your total mileage. The Expensify app has a great mileage feature that can help you track all year!
4. Everyday Tracking
   Expensify was made for everyday tracking. Each business-related purchase should be tracked shortly after the receipt is received. Once you’ve decided Expensify is your solution, organizing receipts you’ve been compiling from the start of the year is the best place to start. SmartScan these receipts and toss them.

Next Year, Best Year!

Now that you have learned how to keep your accountant happy and make their life easier during tax season, you’re both on your way to a better next year. Although trampoline jumping, hot tubbing, and yard running are super fun, tracking daily expenses for a shorter visit is better ideal. Your accountant and children will thank you later.

Need more tax organizing tips for the new year? Check out some of these additional tips to help you out!

The Primary Cause of Tax Season Pain 

According to the the American Psychological Association’s 2014 Stress in America survey, “Paying with Our Health”, money is the most significant source of stress in our lives. So much that money has “consistently topped Americans’ list of stressors since the first Stress in America survey in 2007.”

The hard-and-fast tax season deadlines associated with tax filing dates make it nearly impossible to avoid coming face-to-face with this major source of stress in our lives.

The same study states that “nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of adults report feeling stressed about money at least some of the time and nearly one-quarter say that they experience extreme stress about money.” 

Image via Stress in America™

Additional Causes of Tax Season Pain

Tax season also brings other sources of stress and fear to the forefront, including:

1. Work stress, since work is the primary source of income for most of us.
2. Relationship stress in form of marital contention, as money is one of the most common sources of disagreement between couples.
3. Fear of making errors that may result in overpaying and/or additional fines and penalties.
4. Fear of deadlines: Not filing on-time can result in additional tax-related problems down-the-road.

Taking these factors into account, it’s not surprising to learn that at least 30% of us procrastinate when it comes to doing our taxes. My guess is that the actual percentage of us who procrastinate, among readers of this blog, is much higher, since a large proportion of that 30% (and I certainly count myself in that number!) are small business owners.

Common Responses to Tax Season Pain

Bankrate lists some common reasons we procrastinate when it comes to doing our taxes, including:

1. Feeling safer doing nothing and that we can avoid mistakes if we don’t do anything to make them in the first place.
2. Being perfectionists and never thinking we’ll be able to do our taxes well-enough to meet the high demands we have of ourselves and that the government has of us.
3. Believing we work better under pressure, or at least think we do.

As much as I’d like to laugh off these reasons and say that there’s no way I’d ever let them affect me, looking honestly at myself tells me that history begs to differ. What makes procrastinating even easier, is that there’s never a shortage of activities that we would rather be doing than preparing to file our taxes.

So what does all of this procrastination get us in the end? Does it give us some relief from the pain of tax time, or from the pain that manifests in the form of stress, tension and anxiety?

The Result of Procrastination: More Pain!

It’s been my experience that putting-off tax preparation only increases the pain I would feel at tax time – the exact opposite of what I was hoping to prevent. I finally got fed up with my inability to break this cycle when I found myself spending New Year’s Eve hunched over my iPad, talking to my accountant via Skype.

What made things worse was that I was talking to him from a hotel on a beach in Thailand, where my wife and I were supposed to be enjoying our first vacation in a very long time. I had delayed my year end tax preparation so far that year that I left myself with no choice other than to ruin a day of vacation.

Instead of enjoying my vacation with my wife, I had to deal with last-minute tax planning decisions that I felt ill-prepared to make, over a spotty Wi-Fi connection. Oh yeah, and then I did it again the next year, this time from a relative’s house in Puerto Rico.

The Good News: It’s Possible to Break the Tax Pain Cycle

So here’s where we get to the good news. There is an easier and better way to avoid tax pain while also preventing it from getting even worse by procrastinating.  We can even avoid this pain in a way that conquers our strongest subconscious tendencies to procrastinate.

We can achieve this by putting in place a simple system that makes it easy to collect the information you need file your taxes. What are the keys to this simple system?

1. It’s extremely simple to set-up
2. It’s just as easy to use.

Once it’s been set-up, the system will just sit there, like a big virtual shoebox with a slot in the top where you can toss your tax information throughout the year and not have to look at it again until the tax deadlines start approaching. Some of the information collection tasks can even be automated, so you don’t have to touch them at all. If you’re going to procrastinate, at least you’ll be better prepared when you do finally do sit down to do your taxes or get the information to your accountant.

Why Use This System?

After implementing this system to prepare myself for last April’s filing deadline, I was able to get all the required tax information to my accountant in less than 30 minutes, on my way out-the-door to catch a flight to the Dominican Republic. If taxes have caused you pain for the last few years, check back for Part 2 of this series for details on this system designed to help you reduce the pain of tax season this year and for years to come.

About the Author:

Chris understands the stress and pain that comes with collecting various tax forms, bank statements, and receipts. To combat this issue, he developed Tax Pain Relief to make the tax information collection process a lot easier and better for himself. It works so well that he has since decided to share the process with others to help them get their tax lives organized, once and for all!

1) Look close the next time you use the Expensify app and you’ll notice after clicking the SmartScan button, there is a new camera that offers:

• Photo library selection:  It was there before, but now it’s easier to find.
• Flash control:  Flash away!
• Rapid fire mode:  Scan that stack of receipts like a boss (or using Wingman, for your boss).

2) Scan and go, one-click flow.  After you take the photo, we go straight to the Expenses list and start uploading right away, so no need to hit Save.

Now, a new camera flow that cuts a couple taps out of the SmartScan flow might not seem that big a deal.  But when you process millions of receipts per month, those precious seconds add up — especially when you’re holding up the line behind you at the cash register while scanning the receipt.  Because as a reminder, the optimal way to use Expensify is to:

a. Buy something delicious, like a hot dog.
b. Open the Expensify app and tap the SmartScan button, while waiting for the receipt.
c. SmartScan the receipt the instant you get it, and hand it back to be discarded.
d. Put your phone in your pocket, and grab the hot dog.  Lotsa onions.
e. Focus on the flavor; your receipt will be uploaded and scanned for you to handle later.

Said another way, if you’re putting your receipt in your pocket, you’re doing it wrong.  Let us handle it for you, it’s what we do!

Anyway, 2014 was a busy, busy year — check out last year’s posts to relive the glory.  But what we’ve got lined up for 2015 is going to blow that out of the water.  Hold onto your hats!

-david

PS: Did you know 37% of billion-dollar startups use Expensify? See who else does here: http://use.expensify.com/customers

WHEN: February 12th, 8pm– 12am PST

WHAT: Full site downtime, all services down. Mobile apps will continue to work as if they are offline.

As part of our commitment to upholding the highest security standards, we rotate encryption keys for our server infrastructure annually. Our next window for updating these keys will be from 8pm – 12am PST, during which users will be unable to access the main Expensify website, including through partner portals such as Salesforce.

We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your understanding.

Name: ZenPayroll

Interested in: “Delightful, modern payroll”

Likes: Businesses looking to completely automate the payroll process

Why we want to go steady:

ZenPayroll automates everything about payroll. Tax filings, calculations, and payments are all taken care of, meaning you never have to worry about deadlines, fines, or inaccuracies. Top that off with a user experience that employees love, and we’re confident that ZenPayroll is definitely something you want to bring home to the family.

Name: Xero Payroll

Interested in: “Beautiful accounting software”

Likes: Blending accounting software with payroll features

Why we’re head over heels:

Xero gives you all the tools you need to run your business. Their gorgeous, real-time charts give you actionable data, helping you make smarter business decisions. Add in tax calculations and simple e-filings and e-paying and we’re in love.

Name: QuickBooks Payroll

Interested in: Ways to “simplify the business of life”

Likes: Helping small businesses manage everything in one place

Why our heart skips a beat:

If you’re running your business on QuickBooks already, QB Payroll is a great way for you to manage payroll on a software you already know and love. Getting total control over your financial data without worrying about manual calculations? It’s definitely more than a crush.

Whether you go with ZenPayroll to completely automate your payroll needs, Xero Payroll, for more control over your data, or QuickBooks Payroll to upgrade your current suite, we’ll be here to join your expenses and accounting data in perfect union.

Already in love with an accounting service and looking for a way to streamline your expenses? Sign up for a free trial or learn more here.

Don’t get lost in a new environment, get acclimated!

Have you ever been to a foreign country and didn’t speak the language? Adventurous but also challenging, right? Sure, these days you can rely on using English almost anywhere you go, but there’s still a lot that gets lost in translation or is just plain impossible to translate. Local dishes, alcoholic beverages, and swear words, are just the tip of the iceberg. The fact is, speaking the local language, or at least trying to, shows interest and respect for the local culture and earns you respect in return. It also make life much easier whether you are trying to order coffee or give directions to the airport. 

Now, let’s migrate this story to the magical lands of modern corporate and startup life. Pretty much anywhere you look, technology is a part of your environment. You have every right to be on either side of the tech-savvy spectrum, but if you want to break the very present yet invisible barrier of entry into the tech world, you gotta work on it!

Haters gonna hate; some might say that tech lingo is no different from any other profession-specific jargon and that it doesn’t deserve any special treatment. Valid point; it’s just that, well, you know, our world is highly technology-driven. From the moment you wake up, you depend on and are using a variety of apps, gadgets, you name it – it’s probably tech-related. Tech is everywhere! I really wish I could insert a Hitchcock’s Psycho inspired scream here… oh, wait, I can!

Anyways, back to the point: if you want to learn to speak tech, you gotta work for it! How?

1. Ask

There is no such thing as a stupid question; uninformed questions, maybe. So get informed! Google. Read. Watch YouTube videos. Listen to (or if necessary, eavesdrop on) engineers when they discuss what they are working on. Talk to them and ask them questions! If you’re the studious type, there are a ton of free and easy resources online. Pick one or as many as you like, you are bound to find something that will make the learning process fun and easy.

Not sure where to start? You can read about some basic tech terminology here. If you’d rather learn by doing, check out Codeacademy.com or Code.org to get your hands dirty and deep in the code.

2. Put Your Pride Aside

It’s okay not to understand everything at first as long as you are ready to learn. Spare yourself the frustration by managing expectations: set a goal that aligns with your current occupation, work environment, or interests. Before you do start on anything, ask yourself this: How much do I need and want to know?

3. Remember, You are Not an Engineer

Kind of obvious, I know, but it keeps expectations at bay. Also handy to keep in mind, you are (most likely) not trying to become an engineer. Sure, some of you might discover that the deeper you go, the more you want to know, and maybe even turn it into a skill or profession. That’s awesome! For the rest, think of learning tech as investing in a better understanding of your environment, your coworkers, and, well, the world in general. If you by some miracle haven’t figured it out on your own already don’t worry! We are all in the same tech boat together (see what I did there ;))

4. It’s About You

Put your back into it! Learning tech

As you grow your tech knowledge, keep in mind that you’re doing it for yourself. In a tech company especially, it can be a matter of life and death — at least career wise. If you want to be fully immersed and engaged into your company work life, development, and wellbeing, you can’t play hide and seek with the technology or product that your company uses, builds and/or sells.

The Cost-Benefit of Speaking Tech

What will “working on it” cost you?

Time and nerves. You will have to invest your free time to explore the strange new lands of the tech lingo world. On the bright side, your wallet doesn’t have to be affected at all by your determination to learn something new… praise the Internet and free learning resources!

What about the benefits?  Learning makes life, or in this case working with engineers and developers, much easier. Also, these new skills might help you advance in your job and eventually manifest as a bump in your salary in the long run.

From a Non-Tech Point of View

As a non-tech person (HR is my arena), I’ve gone and still am going through the process of learning. I started by simply Googling unfamiliar words and terms I came across while reading resumes and cover letters. Then I continued on by reading blogs, watching videos, asking questions, etc and it’s been enlightening! Just the other day in a meeting discussing job descriptions for the mobile team, I found myself really appreciating the knowledge on tech jargon (and tech in general) that I’ve accumulated so far. As a result of taking the initiative, I now feel more comfortable in my position and am much more productive in my work. My conclusion? The benefits of learning tech definitely outweigh the costs!

Are you a non-techie working in a tech company or maybe just interested in understanding the tech world better? Awesome! Do you already speak tech or are you working on it? Tell us about your experiences and/or struggles in the comments below!

Fact: America loves wine.

Fact: Millennials really, really love wine. So much so that they’re changing the way wine is being marketed and consumed.

Expensify’s favorite? Rose! (Image via Uproot)

Newcomer Uproot Wines has figured this out, and they’ve designed their entire business model around this younger audience. After going to market in mid-2013 (their first harvest was in 2011), Uproot’s tech-driven winery has found its way into the premium wine market by word of mouth (also, a feature on the Today Show didn’t hurt either). 

The Napa-based wine startup is all about procuring great wine for the next generation of wine drinkers, and astounding and delighting their customers plays a big part in their brand strategy. To delight and astound both new and old customers alike, they’ll need to incur a few expenses along the way.

Excel Spreadsheets: Rinse and Don’t Repeat

Expenses were the last thing on co-founder Jay Levy’s mind when he was building Uproot. “Our previous expense management system was pretty rudimentary, but it worked well enough that we didn’t need anything else. We filled out an Excel spreadsheet, stapled receipts to the expense report, and dropped it off in the office,” Levy explains. “I had used that [Excel] expense management template for about ten years, and when I started Uproot Wines, it didn’t occur to me to change the process to something else.”

Co-founders Greg Scheinfeld and Jay Levy (Image via Uproot)

Everything was smiles and rainbows at first, but not for long. The problem began when Levy realized that Excel spreadsheets did not support a thorough archiving system. “As the Uproot team grew, I realized it was essential to have a central repository of everyone’s expense reports in an easy-to-find location for accounting purposes.” Levy adds, “As a cofounder, partner, and investor at Zelkova Ventures, I keep up with what’s happening in the SaaS and B2B space, so it was through my position there that I heard about Expensify. Based on our initial assessment, [Expensify] sounded like a product that could solve that problem and improve on others once and for all”

With a new expense reporting tool, Levy had a few needs. “I needed to find a system that would be easy to implement and use,” says Levy. “Excel is tedious and time-consuming, but it’s also pretty easy to use. It doesn’t take much time to ramp up employees on it, and I wanted to make sure the new system would be just as easy, if not easier to implement.”

His Verdict?

“The fact that I’ve been using Expensify for so many years says a lot. There are so many freemium products out there that make it easy to switch if I don’t like my current app,” says Levy. “At one point, I trialled Shoeboxed, but it was a no go. You have to send them your receipts, so it became more hassle than it was worth. I love Expensify, so I won’t be changing our system any time soon. My team loves using the app, and the [Expensify] process works fantastically for both Approvers and employees.”

An Expense Reporting Solution for Everybody

“When our employees travel around the country to sell our special wines, the mileage tracking feature is incredibly helpful in maintaining accurate logs,” says Levy. “I also hear pretty often [from employees] that the app is easy to use. The mobile app in particular makes the reporting process easier; our employees love it! All they need to do is snap a photo and let SmartScan do the rest. They also link their bank cards so that the imported card will automatically match the receipt to the credit card expense. While this process is pretty standard, Expensify offers a number of ways to report an expense, which allows everyone to be happy with the process that’s most efficient for them. As a entrepreneur and venture investor, I highly recommend that companies of all sizes use Expensify to manage their expense-related activities. Expensify provides a seamless workflow along with a great storage solution for these critical reports. It beats out Excel every time!”

Interested in saving time and finding an expense reporting process that works for your entire team? Take a page from Uproot’s book and experience it yourself! Sign up for a free trial or get in touch at help@expensify.com if you need help setting up!

Interestingly enough, I came across the question of how difficult it is to be a CEO in today’s startup ecosystem.  The question, at length, from Quora: 

This seems to be two questions: what does a CEO do, and is it hard?

As to the first, I think it depends on the organization you are trying to build.  In my case, I’m trying to build an organization that runs itself: ideally the organization would evaluate and prioritize the available opportunities objectively, create and execute plans efficiently, and ultimately go out and do amazing things with minimal need of me.  Accordingly, I view my job as primarily one of auditing the system to make sure it’s functioning correctly (eg, that there are good processes in place, that they are being followed, and having the desired effect), and only stepping in when things are off the rails in a way that the organization can’t seem to fix itself.

So yes, as CEO I do all the things you mention — talk with partners, brainstorm, recruit, etc — but only to the degree that I’ve failed to enable the organization to do all that without me.  On a good day, I do nothing but sit back and watch.

As to the second question — is it difficult being a CEO — I’d say it depends on the day.  I find it’s getting easier over time as the team is able to step up and handle a wider range of issues without my involvement, and able to maintain forward momentum on the most important things without my prodding.  Indeed, the hardest part anymore is trying to resist the urge to over-engage in a system that’s working well enough — even if not as well as I’d like.

In fact, the single hardest part of my job is explicitly stepping back and allowing someone to fail — believing that something is a mistake and will probably be regretted at great anxiety to the organization — with recognition that failure is a cost of discovery.

At the end of the day, I’m just one guy.  Though I know a lot about a lot of things, I know very little about everything.  Accordingly, my goal as CEO is to build an organization full of people who are experts at figuring things out for themselves… without killing each other along the way.

In short, I view my job as CEO not to pursue my personal vision for the local maximum, but to build an organization capable of pursuing a global maximum larger than anybody can see.  This seems very different than what most of the others have written on the thread — especially the “professional CEOs” that seem to thrive in a command-and-control structure (so long as they’re on top).  Personally, I hate working for those CEOs, and if you do too I’d be honored to have you as part of the team.

Hosted by Tech Crunch and Venture Beat, the 8th Annual Crunchies Awards will be presented Thursday, February 5, 2015. This competition celebrates the best startups, internet and technology innovations of the year.

Each company has been nominated and hand-selected by the Crunchies Committee based on their accomplishments during the year 2014. Each category includes five companies and voting is open to the public. Today is the last day to get your votes in! 

Drum Roll Please…

Expensify is excited to announce our customers who have been nominated in the following categories:

Best On-Demand Service
Choosing a favorite in this category is impossible with so many great services used daily. Whether we are traveling and need a place to crash, in a time crunch to ship out our swag, or stranded across town, these on-demand services all deserve a Crunchie.
Hotel Tonight’s motto involves planning less and living more. If you give them 10 seconds they’ll get you a great deal at your soon-to-be favorite hotel.
Lyft is easy, and affordable with some of the friendliest drivers you’ll meet all day.
Shyp is the easiest way to ship anything, anywhere by simply request a package pickup and they take care of the rest.
Uber seamlessly connects riders to drivers through their app making cities more accessible.

Best E-Commerce Application
We are busy little Expensifiers who need fuel throughout the day. We are huge advocates for this application, ordering sometimes twice a day!
Instacart connects you with personal shoppers in your area who deliver groceries from your favorite local stores in as little as an hour.

Best Design
Medium is a platform for everyone from professional journalists to amateur storytellers and non-profit leaders so they encourage writers if you’ve got something to share, jump in.
Our designers, Shawn and Leanne, are totally aligned with this nomination. Medium has a beautiful interface, easy navigation, and the photography… oh, the photography!

Best Bootstrapped Startup
Grammarly‘s flagship product corrects contextual spelling mistakes, checks for more than 250 common grammar errors, enhances vocabulary usage, and provides citation suggestions. With more than 4 million registered users worldwide, there is no doubt they’re going home with a Crunchies.

Best Enterprise Startup
Github is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over eight million people use GitHub including us Expensifiers!

Best Education Startup
What’s not to love about startups bringing easily accessible classes to better this generation and the next? We love them both… who will you choose?
AltSchool is a collaborative community of micro-schools that uses outstanding teachers, deep research, and innovative tools to offer a personalized, whole child learning experience for the next generation.
Coursera is an education platform that partners with top universities and organizations worldwide, to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free.

Best New Startup of 2014
Shyp (see above)
Product Hunt is a place for product-loving enthusiasts to share and geek out about the latest mobile apps, websites, hardware projects, and tech creations.
Two totally different concepts. We suggest you purchase great new gadgets on Product Hunt & summon Shyp to surprise your family across the country!

Best Overall Startup of 2014
Another toss-up here with two applications everyone at Expensify HQ love. A good SnapStory on a night out followed by a safe ride home is what millennials’ dreams are made of.
Snapchat is a photo messaging service where users can take photos, record videos, add text and drawings, and send them to a list of recipients.
Uber (see above)

Fastest Rising Startup
Reddit is an entertainment, social networking service where registered community members can submit content, such as text posts or direct links.
Lending Club is the world’s largest online marketplace connecting borrowers and investors.

Founder of the Year
Not only do we love Zendesk as a customer, but we are huge fans of their application. Expensify’s support team relies on their tool to efficiently answer users’ questions daily. Mikkel Svane, Alexander Aghassipour and Morten Primdahl, founders of Zendesk, are clearly getting our vote!

We hope you love our Expensifers as much as we do… what are you waiting for? Vote now!

This week’s Expensifier of the Week is MSP Leadership, a London based company developing and inspiring leaders of all levels through executive coaching, leadership development and team development workshops.

MSP-Leadership was founded to push the limits of leadership in pursuit of excellence. A former Concur user, expense reports used to take time away from that. The MSP team used to “spend years scanning receipts and filling out spreadsheets,” says Director Aaron Penwill. With more complex reports on their horizon, they knew it was time for a change. As a result of the switch, the team agrees they work at least 20% faster than Concur and 200% faster than their old expense reporting process. 

All It Took Was One Click

The most beneficial asset to using Expensify is the simplicity. “Everything is easy to use and the mobile app allows every team member to capture expenses on the move.” They also love the ability to save reports as a PDF to provide clear evidence of expenses in-line with clients’ policies. Aaron says “Bye, bye depressing stock piles of receipts with your crinkled paper and small font, hello Expensify! Your slick app, nice colors, and snazzy photos of receipts are highly recommended to improve your workplace, your work, and your well being!”

It’s More Than the App

Aaron agrees saving time on approving expenses leaves him more time to “concentrate on causing anarchy in the face of doing good.” He recommends Expensify because of ease of use and customer service. He says, “…you get a sense they [Expensify] want to know who their customers are. They seek feedback and listen to it.”

Not only does Aaron agree our app is great, he also agrees people are the backbone of an organization. Creating the right environment for employees to flourish is a major part of creating a team that believes in organization and works towards its goals. “Creating a ripple effect, starting with the leadership, takes something small and makes it legendary. Not only has Expensify’s app changed our organization’s financials, but working alongside a company who sees eye to eye with our values gives us that added trust. We are so glad we switched from Concur,” says Aaron.

Ready to see for yourself how Expensify can help you have more time to focus on the important things?— It’s free for the first 30 days!

Merchant auto completion on the new expenses dialog

This “simple” addition required some thinking on how people are using our product and what would be the best experience for them.

Like every product change, it is crucial to define how important this feature is and how important the flow supported is. Editing the merchant name of an expense is part of the expense editing flow. While important, this is kind of a secondary flow for us. We are optimizing the usage of our SmartScan and bank import technologies to automate the process of creating expenses in an user account. By using these two technologies in conjunction with Expense Rules, users can automate the vast majority of the expense reporting experience.

Despite that however, the ability to manually change a merchant name is still necessary because:

• SmartScan can fail
• The name of the transaction in the bank account might be terrible
• The user simply needs to create a cash expense.

Having auto completion for this step is not mandatory, but it can make the user experience much smoother. Details like this make the difference between a great experience and an amazing one.

Prepping the Build

With all that in mind, we can only spend a few hours building this auto completion mechanism. Why? We are a small and dynamic team, and we need to aggressively prioritize our development hours to projects with the highest ROI.

The first question we asked ourselves regarding auto completion is the origin of the data. Where does the merchant we are suggesting come from? Are they merchants the user has previously used? Or are we picking our suggestions from all merchants in our system?

1. Using Data From User History vs. All Data History

Basing auto completion on a user’s past expenses runs into issues quickly as a new user with a brand new account. With no historical data, it would be very difficult to find merchants for auto complete. On the other hand, if we pick from all merchants in the existing Expensify database, there is a much higher chance that someone else has bought something from this merchant, so we can easily find that merchant and offer it as a suggestion.

2. Variations – What Should We Do?

Expensify’s database holds millions of different merchants from all over the world and in every business area imaginable. Sadly, this amazing source of data can not be used directly, because for each merchant, there can be a dozen variations due to inconsistent cases, typos, location, or other extra information.

Let’s take the Hilton hotels as an example. We have “Hilton”, “Hilton hotel”, “Hilton hotel San Francisco”, “Helton”, and possibly many other variations. This level of variation can be due to user input but mostly comes from our bank import technology, which allows users to automatically import their transactions coming from their bank account and into Expensify. The same merchant can show up completely different depending on the bank; for example, you might have noticed that merchant names in your bank statements are not exactly nice or accurate, to say the least. We have a few ways to “clean up” the data imported, but the number of possible variations makes it impossible to be perfect.

3. Solving the Variations Issue

Why is this diversity is a problem? Well, if the user starts to type “Hilton,” the suggestions he could get include  “Hilton”, “Hilton hotel,” “Hilton hotel San Francisco,” or “Hilton New York,” which are in fact the same exact merchant. What if the user was looking for a merchant called “Hilton BBQ”? It could have appeared immediately if the hotel suggestions were collapsed into one.

To solve that issue, we could just clean our data set by removing the extra suggestion and keep only “Hilton” for the hotel. Problem, we would need to review every single merchant in our database to check if we want to offer a suggestion with it or not. What we can do instead is to build a smarter algorithm that weights the results.  The autocompletion will not just be based on the merchant that starts with the same letters, but it will also take into account the frequency/popularity of the merchant. As a result, the most popular merchant will be shown first, and the more letters the user types, the more precise the suggestions become.

Thanks to weighted result, we can suggest popular merchant even after 1 letter

In our current implementation, we are using a combination of both: we have extracted and cleaned merchants and we are using their frequency for the suggestions.

Building Out the Feature

With all these parameters, how did we actually build the auto-categorization feature?

We couldn’t go with a pure JavaScript implementation because we have way too many merchants to send with the site, and if we wanted to offer the same functionality in our mobile app, we would need to recode the same algorithms.

So instead, we need an API around that. The API has to be extremely fast to allow us to autocomplete as people are typing. It has to scale with our spiky traffic, should not wake our ops team at night but still be up all the time, etc. To do this, we decided to use Constructor.io, a brand new service offering autocompletion as a service. We send them our data set, and in exchange we get a purely functional, worry-free, API endpoint to get our autocomplete suggestion. And because autocompletion is their business, they offer a feature that we would not have thought such as typo handling.

Even if the input is “Stor”, Starbuck is being suggested at the end, to handle the case of a typo

Thanks to Joanie for the proof reading. This post was originally published on my site.