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.

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!

Don't be frustrated, we've all been without 3G

The best way to upload receipts on the go is to download the Expensify app for your mobile phone and snap a picture of the receipt. Voila – it’s instantly uploaded to your account.

But sometimes you are unable to upload the receipt onto the interwebs. Even hardware gets the blues.

Sometimes 3G is not available on the farm

Do you find yourself stuck without 3G coverage? Are you in San Francisco on ATT? Are you traveling and your data plan is prohibitively expensive abroad? Don’t worry – you can still get your receipt safely uploaded into Expensify.

Simply take a picture of the receipt using your phone’s camera and email it to receipts@expensify.com. When you regain an internet or 3G connection all of the queued emails will be sent and we’ll upload any receipts to your account in bulk. Magic!

That's right, just email it in!

I know, it makes me happy too

Stay tuned for more Pro Tip Mondays!

Are you one of those keyboard ninjas who does expense reports as fast as lightning? Or are you just trying to shave off extra seconds from your workflow? Here’s one tip that’s amazingly short and useful (like me!).

Press ‘Esc’ – the escape button – to close a dialog.

Now you see it...

+ 'esc' = now you don't

That’s it.

This pro-tip brought to you by the shortest, awesomest person in the Expensify office.

QuickBooks is an amazingly powerful tool.  It can be configured (and misconfigured) countless ways.  But the high level concept of how to export from Expensify to QuickBooks desktop is relatively straightforward.  There are a bunch of detailed instructions in our help section, but here’s a quick step-by-step guide — feel free to print it out so you can follow along.

Phase 1: Clean up your account
First, if you’ve already started exporting and it’s not working for you for some reason, I suggest cleaning up your account so we can start over from scratch.  Don’t worry: you won’t lose any data or affect your QuickBooks company file or Expensify reports in any way — this just removes any old connections so we can rebuild them from scratch.

1. Sign in to Expensify using the https://expensify.com link (eg, do notsign in via Intuit Workplace). This just keeps things easy.
   • If necessary, reset your password by going to https://expensify.com/signin and clicking “forgot your password?”
2. Click “Settings” in the upper right, then “Connections” on the left, and click “delete” next to any existing QuickBooks connections. This won’t affect your data, but it will just disconnect it from your Expensify account.
3. Remove your “Intuit” secondary login. Just more cleanup. Click “Settings” in the upper-right, then “Account” on the left, and click “[remove]” next to any “intuit” line in the “Secondary Logins” section.

Phase 2: Connect to QuickBooks and export the report
Next, let’s go set up a new connection to QuickBooks using the QuickBooks web connector, and then export our first report.

1. Shut down QuickBooks, QuickBooks web connector, or essentially anything Intuit or QuickBooks-related on your desktop.
2. Close all web browsers.
3. Open a new web browser (I strongly recommend Google Chrome).
4. Sign in to the Expensify website direct using this link: https://expensify.com
   • Note: Do NOT sign in via Intuit Workplace, Intuit App Center, or by clicking anything inside of QuickBooks. This is an advanced feature.
5. Click “Reports” at the top of the Expensify site.
6. Click the name of the report you want to export.
• If there are no reports here, click “new report” and create one for testing — add at least one expense to it by clicking “new expense”. Basically, expenses needed to be added to a report before they can be exported to QuickBooks.
7. Click “export to…” along the top.  If there is no “export to…” button:
   • If someone else submitted this to you, click “approve” first, and choose “final approve”.
   • If you created this report, click “archive” first.
8. Choose the company you want to export to.
   • If no companies are listed, follow these instructions.
   • When done, go back to step (1) and start over.
9. Review the export options — this explains exactly where the data will be put inside QuickBooks.
10. Click “export” at the bottom.
11. Open the QuickBooks company file on your desktop.
12. Open the QuickBooks Web Connector by clicking “File -> Update Web Services” inside QuickBooks.
    • If it doesn’t open, reboot computer and try again.
    • If it still doesn’t open, call Intuit (888-222-7276).
13. Verify the Expensify connection is selected.
14. Click “Updated Selected”
15. This will cause QuickBooks to connect to Expensify and download the information into QuickBooks. When it reaches 100%, it should be done.

And that should do it.  It’s not exactly a painless process, but it’s an incredibly powerful one.  If you get stuck in any of the above steps, please email help@expensify.com, indicate at exactly which step the problem occurred, and include a screenshot of exactly what you’re seeing.  The more detail you can give us, the better we can help.  Thanks!

Sometimes all you need to do is email in your receipt, which you can do by attaching the receipt to an email and sending it to receipts@expensify.com. You can also send it in from other email addresses by adding secondary logins. But what if you want to create an expense along with your receipt – by email?

To create a new expense with the receipt already attached, provide a dollar amount and description of the expense in the “Subject” line of the email, and attach a photo of the receipt. For example, next time you take a taxi, just take a picture of the receipt with your phone, and email it to us with the subject “$25 – Taxi.” We’ll add the ride to your list of expenses with the receipt already attached. Do this from your computer, your netbook, your friend’s netbook, or your smartphone. Simple!

You can learn about this and more by visiting our help section here: https://www.expensify.com/help.

So you’re all set up with Expensify through your work email, bob@bobscompany.com. And your co-worker Alice just told you that you can upload receipts by emailing them to receipts@expensify.com. That’s great, because you just snapped a picture of a receipt from your phone, and now is the best time to email it in before you forget. “But wait!” you think. “I only have my personal email address setup on my phone. Expensify has no idea that bob@mail.com is my email address too!”

Of course, the Expensify team has already contemplated this scenario for you, and we have a perfect solution!

You can add any email address as a secondary login. This means that it will be recognized the same way as your primary email address: you can sign in with it, and you can email in receipts from it. Phone numbers are also valid as a secondary login; set up a phone number in order to add expenses by text message. (Yes, you can add expenses by text message!) Feel free to add as many secondary logins as you need.

To add a secondary login, head over to your Settings page, and under the Secondary Logins section you’ll see a 5 letter code called your Unique ID. Simply send an email from the address you wish to add (for example, your personal email) and include the 5 letter Unique ID in the subject line. That’s it! Go back to your Settings page to confirm that it’s been added; it should now appear in the list.

Now suppose you have left Bob’s Company, so your old email address, bob@bobscompany.com, is no longer valid. In this case you should change your primary login – just click the [make primary] button – in order to remove the old email address you no longer need.

Our users have many other reasons for adding secondary logins to their account. For instance, if your personal assistant needs to upload your receipts to your account from his email address, then add his email as a secondary login. It’s just a matter of getting creative in your workflow, and do what works for you.

You can learn about this and more by visiting our help section here: https://www.expensify.com/help.

Expense policies in Expensify offer the option to create custom report fields, which are appended inside each report. Users often ask us how they can include custom fields in a report which are complex and dynamically update with relevant information. There is actually a way to do this with Formulas, a little not-so-secret feature with powerful effects. When used right, formulas can help you achieve pretty much any output you’d want in a report. The best way to learn about formulas is with an example.

A Formulaic Example

Let’s suppose that we have three custom fields in our report, which the submitter of the report is required to fill in: Type of Expense, Client Name, and City.

Now, suppose we want to add a fourth field for our Accountant to use, so that he can code the Report appropriately in the accounting software. He needs the field to include the City name and the report total, along with the report submitter’s email. This new field, however, does not need to be filled in – it can be dynamically generated with the existing values using Formulas.

First, add the title of the new field.

Then, put the formula in the value of the field. Use the formulas help page as your cheat sheet. We can add the report submitter’s email with: {report:submit:from}. Let’s also include the City by accessing the field’s value: {field:City}. Finally, we add the report total’s reimbursable amount to the mix: {report:reimbursable}.

The Final Result

To recap, the value for the field Accounting Code is: {report:submit:from} – {field:City} – {report:reimbursable}. This ends up showing the report submitter’s email, the City field, and the reimbursable total. Moreover, this field will be automatically calculated on the fly inside the report.

To make the report title itself dynamic, just add a custom field named “Title.” You can check out our formulas, and other tips on how to use them, in our awesome guide here: https://www.expensify.com/help/formulas. Explore the power of formulas in your expense reports.

Let’s say you have a lot of similar expenses that you’d like to edit in the same way. For instance, if you import your expenses via a credit card, often times the merchant names of the same place can be almost identical except for some code store gibberish put in there. Or you want to re-categorize 15 expenses to the same category. What do you do?

Well, we’ve got the perfect solution to this! Head on over to the Expenses page, select the expenses you would like to edit, and click the “edit multiple” button. Then the Edit Multiple dialog will pop up. Any fields that you change here will affect all the selected expenses, any fields left blank will leave the expense as is. So, if the expense amounts are all different, and you wish to keep these intact, leave the amount field blank.

Here’s a graphical step by step run through:

Step 1

Select all the expenses you wish to edit, then click "edit multiple"

Step 2

In the Edit Multiple Dialog, fill in the fields you wish to change, leave the rest blank.

Step 3

Done! The expenses should reflect the changes.

This has been a long-awaited and oft-requested feature, yet another small change that marks a big improvement. Until next week, this has been another edition of Expensify Pro Tips!