Yes, accounting and finance departments, we’re talking to you!
With 2012 in full swing, everyone at Expensify is excited by the opportunity to make this year even better. Don’t get us wrong, 2011 was awesome! But we’re a startup, and re-thinking the old to build something new is an oft-repeated mantra. As larger and larger companies increasingly drink the Expensify kool-aid – or our own Expensify beer thanks to a resident brewmaster – our sights are squarely aimed at the scary-sounding world of “enterprise accounting.”
As you may recall, in late-2011 Expensify unveiled functionality that allows anyone to create and edit a very flexible CSV export file. This functionality enables our system’s Categories and Tags to speak the parlance of enterprise accounting and CRM packages. It’s called GL Mapping, and we’re super excited about the potential of this functionality, especially in the context of our self-service, bottom-up adoption model. With that said, we are still in the exploration stage when it comes to enterprise accounting and ERP systems, and for some reason, it conjures images of scary pumpkins. So we thought we should take up some white space to learn what’s out there. Thus far, we’ve talked to customers that use Sage, SAP, Oracle, Netsuite, Intacct, and many others.
But more than names, we’re interested to learn about the types of accounting configurations that we need to support. Past conversations have worked out how to export Expensify’s data into a MySQL database before eventually feeding this information into an accounting package. This was luckily solved by a bit of accounting triage; in other words, correctly mapping the columns in the company’s database. We’ve also seen customers that must track a variety of inter-related GL Codes, both at the expense-level and at the report-level, and this has required a good deal of problem solving for all involved.
This brings us to the interactive part! We’d love to hear from you about your GL setup. Specifically:
- Do you have any pain points with Expensify’s existing GL functionality? What are they?
- Do you feel like Expensify doesn’t support your accounting package or setup? Why?
- Is accounting integration the most important factor in your purchase decision, or does other functionality like automation matter more?
Please join this conversation in the comments or feel free to email jmills@expensify.com. Thanks!
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The feature we’d like the most is another separate transaction-level multi-choice field, like a Tags2. Our non-profit uses the open source FrontAccounting package and we do fund accounting with it. Each expense is allocated to a Category, a “fund”, and a “budget” which is used to report on expenses across categories and funds. We decided to jam the most common fund and budget combinations together in the Tags field, but it’s ugly and counter-intuitive at times. Finally we have a [Python] script that processes CSV exported from Expensify in order to massage it into another CSV layout for import into FrontAccounting.
Hi maasj, thanks for sharing your organization’s creative approach. We’ve been working with several non-profits to better accomodate fund accounting, and I’m actually working on a follow-up piece incorporating specific recommendations. It’d be great to schedule a time to learn more about your organization’s setup ahead of that piece, and also see if solutions that have worked for other non-profits would works for your’s as well. Please let me know at jmills@expensify.com!