Expensify Blog

The easiest way (second to SmartScans of course!) to add expenses to Expensify is to import your bank/credit card. Linking your bank/credit card is the best way to capture expenditures made on these accounts, and will let you see all of your spending in one spot! We’ll even update your transactions as soon as new purchases become available. Most transactions under $75 are also eligible for automatically generated eReceipts.

Before we get into any detail on how to get this set up, the first thing you want to do is to make sure that you can log in to your bank’s website. If you can’t, Expensify will not be able to communicate with them.

Link your account by clicking the Import credit card/bank account icon on your Dashboard and follow along with the step by step instructions.

Additional cards and accounts can be added by going to Settings -> Credit Cards and clicking on the “Import card/bank” button.

Step 1
Pick your bank from the list of most frequently added banks or type in its name to bring it up in a search

Step 2
Connect with your account by using the same Username and Password you use for online banking.

Step 3
We’ll pull in all of the accounts tied to your username; just pick and choose the ones you want to import. If you are importing a corporate credit card, or any other account that you don’t pay directly, make sure to un-check the box for “the expenses on these cards are reimbursable” when importing the card.

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

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.

With Tax Day looming, many of you have been asking our Help Desk just how certain you can be that the eReceipts Expensify Guarantees are, in fact, IRS-compatible and really guaranteed.

While we really don’t want to put ourselves in the position of legally advising anyone on their taxes – you should talk to a tax lawyer for that – we can say, with pride, that we meet and exceed all of the requirements put forth by the IRS in Publication 463.

Here are the basic rules to keep in mind:

• Your purchase must be under $75
• We can’t create eReceipts for hotel bills – no lodging charges, then.
• The IRS requires non-paper receipts to be Timely, Accurate, and Written – our syncing with your bank and credit card ensure the first two, and by virtue of creating eReceipts in a permanent electronic form, we’ve ensured the last

We worked in close conjunction with the IRS to ensure that our eReceipts would stand up to a tough test – and as one Expensify client recently learned when his contractor expense report with the Department of Defense was audited, these eReceipts stand up to the toughest.

You’ve got the expense, now what?

So you’ve found the expense you were looking for, and you want to attach a receipt to it. Clicking on the green “+” icon will bring up the View Receipts dialog, which has a thumbnail view of all of your receipts. The problem: many thumbnails don’t show the relevant information, such as the merchant or amount, that allow you to distinguish which receipt belongs where. The solution: browse full sized receipt images and attach it to the expense immediately.

Browse Receipts

Click on the image to get a blown up image of the receipt. Here you can easily view the merchant, date, amount, and any other information the receipt may contain. Hover over the left or right portions of the receipt and click the navigation arrow to move on to the next receipt. At the bottom you can also see which expense you are attaching a receipt to. Once you’ve found a match, click attach and you’re done.

Pro Tip

Much of the navigation in our site can be done with keyboard shortcuts. When browsing receipts, you can click the left/right arrows on your keyboard to see the previous/next receipt. You can always hit ‘esc’ to close the dialog.

We know many of you incur a lot of similar or repetitive expenses, and sometimes those charges can look suspiciously like duplicates. For managers out there who have to approve reports, these duplicate doppelgängers can spell trouble. But we’ve figured out a way to take you step by step through the audit process for these receipts that ensure no two people submit the same receipt image, and no single user submits the same receipt twice.

First: When you receive a report, confirm that the reported expense matches what is on the receipt image. While you probably treat this as due diligence already, we bring it up because it still lays the foundation for the entire audit and can allow you to catch any other line-by-line errors early in the process.

For example:

Our reported expense above matches the receipt listed below:

Second: On a periodic basis – perhaps monthly – visit your Expenses page and choose “Reported Expenses” on the left. This will display all expenses that were ever submitted for approval. If you set the date range to the month you want to audit, you can sort the table by Merchant Name by clicking the “Merchant” header, and then by “Amount.”  You can see this in the screenshot below:

Third: Scan down this sorted list for any transactions for identical amounts with similar merchants and dates. You can see an eye-catching similar expense below:

Fourth & Finally: Click on the receipt icon next to any matching/very similar transactions to see the receipt and verify for sure that they are different. Many receipts, for instance, have a transaction number or receipt number listed on them, so even if employees have made legitimately duplicate purchases, their receipts should be slightly different to allow for different transaction times and receipt number.

An important note to remember that Expensify helps you with: eReceipts can never be duplicate expenses. Because they are generated specifically by your credit card charges, they cannot be the same charge uploaded twice. So any time you see the “E” receipt icon in the receipt column during an audit, you can skip over those charges and rest assured that they are already audited and approved as unique charges.

And that’s a really basic way to use Expensify to audit your duplicate expenses!