Expensify Blog

As you might have seen on the site, we’ve done some serious reshuffling.  To give you some quick background on each, the major changes include:

• More free scans! — It’s always free to upload receipt images without using our premium “scanning” feature.  And previously we gave every new account 10 free receipt scans, period.  But we’re raising the bar and now all accounts get 10 free scans every month.  Our data suggests that that’s adequate for about 98% of active users, with only a 2% of “power users” going beyond that (and they go *way* beyond that).
• And to celebrate just how awesome things are going, we’re giving away unlimited free receipt scanning through the rest of 2011.  Have you got a box of receipts you want to organize before the new year?  Now’s the perfect chance — scan away to your heart’s content and it won’t cost you a dime!
• 50-State Reimbursement! — We’ve made some very difficult and expensive but extremely boring legal changes that now allow us to reimburse via direct deposit in all 50 states (previously we only did 12). We’ve also dramatically changed the setup process to do away with “voided checks” and instead just have you enter your own information and confirm it with a series of “test deposits”. The result is a more seamless setup experience with universal coverage.
• New tiered account plans — Until now, every Expensify user had the same account with the same capabilities.  This worked surprisingly well, but as our user count skyrockets, we’ve found that it’s useful to have different “tiers” of accounts targeted to different users with different requirements.  All the functionality you’ve come to know and love is still there (and a bunch more), but now not all of it is thrown into everybody’s face all the time.  To change your plan, just go to https://expensify.com/upgrade and read all about it.
• New “Corporate” features — Recognizing the needs of some of our larger customers, we’ve added:
• GL Codes – Advanced, highly-customizable accounting integration with a wider variety of ledger systems.
• Domain Control – Central administration of accounts while protecting the privacy of users.
• Digital Signatures – Enhanced audit trail with signed snapsohts of the report stored at key points.
• No more Personal policy — just personal settings.  In the past, the “policy” is what defined your tags and categories.  Every new account included a “Personal” policy, such that everybody could configure their own categories and tags.  However, a policy also does a whole lot more than that, and the rest of the policy functionality was confusing users who just wanted the basics.  So, lesson learned!  Now you configure your categories in tags in a “Settings” section called, that’s right, “Categories and Tags”.  Brilliant!
• No more People page — Along the top of every page is a “nav bar” that has such items as “Expenses”, “Receipts”, and so on.  It previously had a “People” section that showed essentially everybody with who you’ve interacted.  However, it’s completely redundant with the “People” section inside each policy, has been a big hassle to maintain, and almost nobody used it.  So in the interests of staying focused on building the tightest, simplest product possible, we removed it.  I don’t think you’ll miss it, but if you, do — I apologize for the inconvenience!
• “Billable” and “Reimbusable” flags are now hidden — Specifically, you no longer see these flags unless you’re using a shared policy.  (The theory being that those flags only make sense in the context of groups, so let’s not confuse people individuals who are using Expensify.)
• And tons of smaller changes that you probably won’t notice.  Our general strategy is to make small, continuous, unannounced changes across the board, making the whole site a little better every day.  But when we do something big like this, we figure it’s best to just let give you a heads up to alleviate any potential for confusion.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for using Expensify.  Please contact help@expensify.com if you have any questions at all.  Keep on Expensifying!

-david
Founder and CEO of Expensify
Follow us at http://twitter.com/expensify