In our new Wednesday series, we’ve set out to explore the topic of “How Do You Expensify?”, highlighting how individuals or companies use Expensify uniquely. Our focus in this series is broad, but we’ll try to limit our scope to best-practice expense management processes, while also highlighting the amazing dexterity of Expensify’s feature set. To begin, we figured why not highlight our most familiar users, ourselves!
Yes, we love our jobs. Yes, that technically means we love expense reports, but we hate spending unnecessary time on them. In that spirit, we use a few nifty features to streamline our process: creating expense rules for recurring expenses and auto-titling reports.
Using Expense Rules for Recurring Expenses
Expense Rules allow Expensify to learn and replicate the way you categorize and tag your expenses. For example, I’m a sucker for a nice filet mignon and I end up at Ruth’s at least 4 days a week. (Thanks for lunch, Expensify!) I’ve set an expense rule to automatically categorize expenses as ‘Employee Morale’ and tag it as ‘Garrett’ if the merchant reads ‘Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse’. Once I snap a quick picture of the receipt with my Expensify mobile app and SmartScan it, my expense rules automatically take care of the rest. To show you how it’s done, I’ve included a picture of me tagging and categorizing my expenses below. (Get it? Because I’m not doing anything.)
Creating Custom Report Titles
To keep me from working too hard, we’ve also automated the naming of reports in our Free Lunch policy by using Custom Report Titles. For our title, we use a basic title (Free Lunch) followed by the date range for the expenses. Learn how to use any combination of report fields (dropdown or textbox) and formulas to create relevant, replicable titles for your policy on our Report Fields page.
These tricks simplify our process, but more importantly they make sure I’m reporting my expenses correctly. Correct expense reporting is a safety precaution here because incorrect procedure will get you a bout in the Expensify octagon with this monster and he’s way less cuddly than he looks.
If you have any questions about custom report titles, expense rules, or if you’d like to be featured in an edition of ‘How do you Expensify?’, please contact us via help@expensify.com and we’ll be glad to assist you.
Expensify Blog 