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
Expensify Blog 
It would be great to know about all changes. Do you have a blog that will list the small changes?
David C.
Fantastic! Very excited and absolutely love love love the product!
You guys are doing so great! Love being your customer.
I love it also except that a lot of the receipts that I scan with my Iphone come up as illegible. Can that be fixed?
That’s odd, the iPhone camera is generally quite good Make sure auto-focus is enabled, enable flash, and then take a clear top-down photo. Make sure the receipt is surrounded by a clear border of background (ideally on a dark background — anything with strong contrast). I hope this helps!
Does the removal of the Personal profile fix the issue with assigning a global change to the mileage rate across all people?
Also, all of my “Forwards To” appears to have been cleared upon removal of the “People” page. Any way to get this back without have to re-keying this information?
Hi Charlie, unfortunately we don’t have central mileage rates yet, but that’s high on our list. As for the “Forwards To” getting clear, that’s very strange — it shouldn’t have affected the policies at all. If you edit the policy and view it’s “People” section, you’ve confirmed the “Forwards to” is no longer set correctly? That’s very strange — can you write help@expensify.com so we can diagnose? How painful would it be to simply re-enter it? Sorry for the inconvenience!
Thanks David. I’ll be on the look-out for the central mileage rates. As to the “Forwards To” comment, you can disregard that issue. My mistake.
Awesome – I love this company. You must have a good group of people there. I hope you keep it up as you grow because there is nothing quite as satisfying as sending a question via email and receiving a response within an hour….and from a person who seems sincerely interested in helping you. I put Expensify up there with Zappo’s in terms of companies whose praises I sing.
Please please, pretty please add the ability to attach more than one document to a line item. We have purchases that require users to submit both a receipt and a PDF of an email (the request from the client to make the purchase), and without the ability to attach both the receipt and the request email…well, it requires us to do a workaround that is clunky. I understand that this isn’t really the forum for that request (and that it could open the flood gates for other problems), but I feel like I have to throw it in every time I can.
Congratulations and many thanks to you and your team! Maybe you can branch out into web applications for all the other annoying tasks in our lives?
“Billable” and “Reimbusable” flags are now hidden — is there any other way to get them back? They are useful when I’m generating reports to send to my company.
These changes sound great. I’ve been using Expensify for quite a while now and have been very satisfied. The only feature I wish was available would be if I could enter how much cash I have at the start of the month and have the expenses deducted from that as they’re entered to show my current balance. Would be nice to check up on Expensify to see how much my current balance is, and maybe even to enter inflows of money.
They should be visible when using an expense policy. Can you verify that your company has shared a policy with you, and that policy has been selected as your Primary Policy (if it is, it’ll be shown in the upper-right corner of the site)? If this doesn’t make them reappear, please email help@expensify.com. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Thanks Jessie, you can attach arbitrary documents to the end of the report, but I agree it’s clunky for that Sorry for the delay!
Great to read this! What impact will upgrading have on our users?
One thing I would like to see — I usually allocate expenses between several jobs — is there a way that I can do that?
I am noticing that the fields for “card” or “cash” is removed. Is this part of the change?
Hon: Hm, really? They should still be there. Can you email a screenshot to help@expensify.com? Thanks, sorry for the inconvenience!
Ric: Typically the “split expense” feature is used for that — choose how many ways you want to split it and it’ll create a separate expense for each, ready for separate tagging (or even adding to different reports).
Melissa: Hopefully only good impact! Write us at help@expensify.com if you encounter any troubles. Thanks!
I can’t figure out how to tag an expense as reembursable.
You asked me for feedback, made followed none of my suggestions, and took out my favorite feature.
Not quite sure i can see the wonders of this update, as I can no longer export reports to my Quick Books application. Am I missing something?
Thomas: Sorry to hear that! QB export is still there: just do the free upgrade to Team, create an expense policy, and link that policy to QuickBooks. It’s still free just like before (policies are free for the first two submitters/mo — if you’re the only one using it it’s free forever). This should let you export just like before. If this doesn’t clarify it, please email help@expensify.com. Thanks, sorry for the inconvenience!
Tom: Sorry for the inconvenience! We determined the “reimbursable” flag is most commonly used within the context of a team, so can you please do the free upgrade to Team, create yourself an “expense policy”, and set it as your “primary policy”? This’ll make the reimbursable flag come back. It’s still completely free (policies are free for the first two users — if you’re the only one using it, it’ll be free forever). If this doesn’t clarify it can you please email help@expensify.com? Thanks, sorry for the hassle!
I’m not a team. There is no workflow. I make a report, print to pdf, and email it in.
I wish you would just open the app up, and charge a one time fee.
What i’m saying is that I love your software, and am willing to pay, but the individual needs that category.
I liked the flags for reimbursable or billable – it helped me track my activity. Please put it back 😦
Hi Soza,
Sorry for the inconvenience! We moved the “reimbursable” flag because it is most commonly used within the context of a team. Can you please do the free upgrade to Team from https://www.expensify.com/upgrade, create yourself an “expense policy”, and set it as your “primary policy”? This’ll make the reimbursable flag come back. It’s still completely free (policies are free for the first two users — if you’re the only one using it, it’ll be free forever). Thanks and sorry for the inconvenience!
Hi Tim,
Upgrading to team will charge you – just add in some additional options like the reimbursable checkbox. We realize that this isn’t ideal for individuals like yourselves and are working on a better way to handle this. I apologize for the inconvenience in the mean time!
I work for Corindus, Inc. but they said we still could not participate in the direct deposit. The company is based in Massachuetts and I am based in Pennsylvania. Would there be a problem having direct deposit for reimbursement in this situation? What is required to facilitate?
Michael: That was true before, but now we support all 50 states. Please ask your admin to enable “Team” functionality, then click “Settings” in the upper-right, and “Reimbursement” on the left — there they can set up reimbursement for your company. Thanks for asking!
Is there any way to link it to our ADP payroll system for re-embursement to our employees?
Any one exporting from Expensify & importing into NetSuite? If so, please drop me a line, I would love to hear how you are doing it. Thanks so much.
Hi Patrick,
There is currently no way to link to ADP for reimbursement. ADP is on our list of integrations to pursue and it’s a bit too early for me to give an accurate time frame on when it will be ready. In the mean time, reports can be marked as reimbursed inside of our app and paid out through ADP. Will that work for you in the mean time?
Hi Jason,
We also have some ideas on this process and would be glad to help out. Feel free to shoot an email to z@expensify.com and we can discuss the export process in more detail. Thanks!
Hi i am having issue with importing my expenses from my card. it was working and suddenly stoped importing expense transaction. can you please help?
Could you please email help@expensify.com so we could take a look in to the issue for you? Thanks!
Can i remove Domain control without hurting existing accounts
Yes, you can. Removing Domain Control will just revert the other accounts to the previous set of permissions that they had before domain control was switched on.
First .. Thanks for fielding such a user-centric product that shows what careful thought, good design, and in-depth testing can deliver. As a “boutique” consulting firm, we know how rare that combination is. So here are my top 3 features that can make a good product better:
1. Give some thought to more administrative and group oriented capabilities. For instance, the ability to mark a group of reports as reimbursed would save a great deal of time; now I have to do them individually.
2. The ability to edit reports would be very handy. While that is under development, how about a simple copy and paste capability that would eliminate the need for recreating a report that needs a field added
3. Persistent date range(s) and sort order(s) are a must and would be a big plus when dealing with more than a few reports.
Persistant
Thanks for all of the good feedback Charles! Lots of what you requested is on our road map and I’m sorry for the trouble it’s causing you right now.