Expensify Blog

Do you or your company use Bill.com? Have you thought about using it but you wanted to make sure that you could integrate your Expensify account with it? Well good news, you can!

If you don’t know about Bill.com – Bill.com is a great platform to streamline and automate vendor bill payment and customer invoicing. To read more about them, visit their site: www.bill.com

Once you have created your company specific Bill.com email address, you will then use that to send your company’s expense reports. When a report has been approved and is ready to send, you will use one of our features in the Reports tab, the ‘share with accountant’ button across the top row:

Once you click that button, you will then see the option to send this report to your @bill.com email address you have already set up.

The ‘share with accountant’ button will remember the last email address that you used for each policy. So if you have multiple policies, you will only have to enter the email address for each policy once.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to email Help@expensify.com, tweet at us: @Expensify or just send us a smoke signal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any and all feedback is welcome!!

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

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

Update 2: And if you missed our Friday webinar:

Recently, I have been receiving a lot of emails asking for help on how to sync Expensify with QuickBooks – so I have the need to re-blog this.In case if you still have questions, we do have a very detailed, step by step guide in our help section as mentioned above (www.expensify.com/help/quickbooks) as well as a weekly Webinar every Friday at 11:30am PST that will go over how to establish this connection and every possible other connection to your account package supported by Expensify. To register for that, click on any of the following links:

You’ve finished implementing Expensify across your entire company when your boss walks in and tells you that you will need to have more control with the users under your company’s Expensify account… You might be thinking to yourself at this point, “How am I going to do that?!?” Don’t worry; we’ve got you covered!

We have this amazing feature called Domain Control to help make everyone on your team happy (including your boss!).  Domain Control enables you to manage user accounts that are part of your company’s divisions. With a domain under your control, you’re able to:

• require strict enforcement of rules,
• disable select features
• delete user accounts

Disclaimer: These abilities are powerful, use them wisely!

Before you get started, make sure that you are on the Corporate Plan.  If you’re not, then just click here and upgrade.  Next, head over to your Settings page, and click the Domain Control tab to the left. This is where you will add your domain.

You will then need to verify ownership of this domain before continuing. You may need to consult your organization’s IT department to complete the verification process… so make sure you get them a cup of coffee before you ask.

You have two very simple methods to verify your domain: Host a File or Add a DNS record.

Once your domain is verified you will now be in control!

With Domain Control, you will have the ability to create and monitor what we call Permission Groups.  Permission Groups are an easy way to group your employees, and let you monitor what they are able to do or not do within Expensify. You can give the Permission Groups you have created any combination of the enforcements/restrictions we have made:

Once you have created all the Permission Groups needed for your company, you can begin to Add Domain Members (read as: this is where you add your employees).

You will use their email address to identify who each of your co-workers are. Once they are added, you will be able to declare what Permission Group they belong to, as well as who is an Administrator.

Don’t worry, you will be able to go back and edit these fields whenever you would like to, provided you are still the admin!

You can learn about this and more by visiting our help section at https://www.expensify.com/help or email Omar@Expensify.com!

Lemony wants to know who fired this dart.

With all the work our team is doing to make our help pages even better, track down some bright new candidates, expand our product offerings, and bring our newest addition on board (welcome, Matt!), we haven’t been blogging as often as we’d normally like.

There’s been a lot of speculation out there about just what type of person works at Expensify (ho, ho, ho), and we thought we’d start taking the opportunity to introduce ourselves. And who could resist starting with a post dedicated to our lovely office mascot, Lemony?  Just look at her!

Lemony is so excited about expense reports!!

Lemony loves to snuggle and attack her friend LambChop, freaks out when her dad (CEO David Barrett) leaves the room even for a second, and gets more excited about a bowl of water than I have ever gotten for anything in my entire life.  Her passion is such that she is prone to drinking so quickly that… well, it immediately comes back up (aka “water bulimia,” according to her dad, David).  She holds the same passion for food of any kind (want proof? Check out the video below.)

Although she is over two years old and fully grown, Lemony is the eternal perfect puppy.  Lemony’s office days (typically Tuesday and Thursday, when she doesn’t have doggy day care or important out-of-the-office business meetings) are always our favorites. Lemony is responsible for office morale, heading up in-office galloping competitions, and making important business decisions like “You guys should relax for a while,” and “This water is top notch; let’s get more!”

Three cheers for Lemony and all the other office pups out there!

They say imitation is the highest form of flattery. But when it comes from competition… what does that even mean? Take our award-winning job post, whose intro includes this line:

“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.”

A competitor — let’s call them “ExpenseFog” — posts the following *three days later*:

“We’re getting hammered by an explosion of users loving our product and we need a hero to come to the rescue. I can guarantee you an amazing opportunity to learn from some of the smartest engineers and business people LA has to offer. Plus an amazing opportunity to make money.”

Seriously dude? Write your own frickin’ job post.

I just read this article about how someone made a Firefox extension to steal sessions from popular websites. Are you kidding me? Security isn’t an easy thing, I’ll admit. And maybe we take security to the extreme. But seriously, it’s amazing how many other sites don’t even do the basics. When choosing any service that involves sensitive information, especially sensitive financial information, I’d suggest always looking for the following:

• Make sure the address starts with https://. (Sometimes this is replaced with an icon of a little padlock.) This means it’s using the “secure” version of HTTP, which is the protocol that powers the web. Make sure it’s there from they very first page you load, and stays there as you browse the site. Sure, it’s a bit more expensive for the company. But it’s the least we can do.**
• Look for PCI compliance. Or, if not that (because it’s pretty intense), at least *some* indication they’re using a third-party approved security framework.
• Look for strong partnerships, such as banks and financial institutions. These guys take security really seriously, so if they’re on board, it’s another vote in the site’s favor.

Real security often isn’t easy. But most important things aren’t.

-david

** Note: I should highlight that this blog doesn’t use HTTPS, but it’s also not asking you for anything. When you sign in to Expensify proper — at https://expensify.com — every connection is secure.

I was taking with a user the other day and I asked “So, we’ve been doing a ton of work, what do you think?”   He thought about it and replied:

I have noticed massive improvements in the iPhone app. With the HTTP application, I’m hard-pressed to think of the changes I’ve encountered.

I was struck in two ways.  The first way was: ‘Wow, we’ve been working around the clock making this thing better, and he didn’t even notice?” But then the second was “Actually, that’s great news.  That means we’re doing things right.”

See, we have two conflicting goals: make the service better, but do so without alarming or upsetting our existing users.  We do this by making very small changes, continuously, and rolling them out in an incremental fashion such that — hopefully — nobody notices.  It just gets a little faster,  easier, and better every day.  Unfortunately (or fortunately?) sometimes we need to make substantial changes that people will definitely notice.  We’ve got a few of those coming up, so I’m going to try to explain what they are as they come, starting with the changes we just released to the reports page.

Behold, Stars and Simpler States

Expense reports can go through a surprising variety of states, many of which are generally uninteresting to you but we need to track anyway.  But whereas before we just threw the full complexity out there for you soak in, in an effort to make things simpler we’ve opted to reduce the number of visible states from over ten to the following five:

• Open – This report is being edited
• Archived – The creator has archived the report
• Submitted – It has been submitted and is awaiting approval
• Approved – It has been “final approved”
• Reimbursed – It has been or is in the process of being reimbursed

Some of these states have informational sub-states — eg an “Open” report might have been “[rejected]“.  It’s still open, but this gives a sense of how it got there.  These sub-states appear in square brackets next to the name of the report.  Additionally, for those reports that are waiting on you to do something, we’ve added a helpful “ToDo” column that has a friendly star in it:

So ya, it’s nothing earth shattering.  Some people might not have even noticed. But it’s the sort of increasingly-visible change we make every day, rolled out in a way that hopefully minimizes the impact on existing users.  We’ve got a lot more on the way, so please speak up if we do something you don’t like or if there’s something you’d like us to do more.  Thanks!

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.