Expensify Blog

At Expensify we make “expense reports that don’t suck.” Our users are not shy about letting us know how Expensify has completely changed the way companies do (and feel about) expense reports.

Heidi Anderson from Groundspeak met Mich at the Finovate conference. Heidi didn’t hesitate to express her love for Expensify, and she even volunteered to dish out the whole story.

Tell me about your company.

Groundspeak was founded in October 2000 by three guys who were working at a dot.com about to dot.bomb. We’re located in Seattle, WA, and are 56 going on 60 (employees). We’re very excited to have been chosen as one of the best companies to work for in Seattle by SeattleMet magazine. Although they don’t list Expensify as one of our key employee benefits, they should!

Tell me about yourself.

I joined Groundspeak in 2007, leaving behind the crazy world of publicly traded companies to be the 19th employee and VP of Finance (and the only member of the Finance/Accounting/HR team). Today I’m the CFO (same job, different title) and we still keep our Finance team pretty small and we have a Director of HR, so things are looking up.

My free time is a little thin right now with all the exciting things happening at the office, but when I have it I dream of surfing in Hawaii and watch HGTV designer shows. (I mentioned I live in Seattle, where it’s cold and grey 10 months of the year?)

What were you using before Expensify?

OMG, where do I start?! Our biggest expense is payroll and we have few regular bills, so we pay most of our ad-hoc expenses with company credit cards. Wrangling receipts from 3 founders, marketing folks and anyone who travels can be exhausting not to mention time consuming. Worse, “discussions” over whether they were never turned in or got “lost” in the accounting in-box (ahem, please don’t put that piece of paper on my desk if you want to see it again) became a dreaded part of month-end close. In addition to the “just put it in the accounting in-box” method of recording and reconciling 12 credit cards each month, we have excel sheets for employee out-of-pocket expenses. When I finally hired an accountant to help, she dreaded that part of month-end close, too.

When did you start using Expensify?

December 2010, when my accountant was about to head out on maternity leave. (She’s finally back on Monday, by the way. Adorable baby girl named Emma)

Tell me about your relationship with Expensify.

Top 10 reasons to love Expensify:

1. It’s easy! (100% of folks with accounts are using it successfully with no or minimal training)
2. It’s fun! (yes, I’m a finance geek)
3. Mobile apps!
4. Best receipt management ever!
5. My CEO loves it!
6. My VPs use it!
7. Print to pdf includes ALL receipts, a complete, portable package (Complete package of audit support can be saved to our internal finance drive).
8. Import directly from the bank!
9. Export to csv (entire month, all employees, in one fell swoop)!
10. Affordable!

(Too many exclamation marks? I couldn’t help myself.)

What do your co-workers say about it?

They don’t – and that’s the best part about it. We went from a system where all they had to do was drop a receipt in the box, and they were complaining. Now, no complaints, and no comments. Just completed expense reports with no hassle. Awesome. (When people do comment, it’s generally to say they “love it!”.)

Has Expensify made their life easier? Harder? In what ways?

Easier. Everyone loves taking a picture of the receipt at a restaurant, uploading it through the app or forwarding via email, and being able to forget about it.

Thanks!

Thanks again for the opportunity to contribute. Keep up the good work.

Thank you Heidi! It’s always refreshing to listen to peek out of our computer screens and read about real live user adventures.

Want to be featured?

If you’re a satisfied Expensify customer and would like to be featured on our blog, drop us a line and let us know.

Share the Love

So you love Expensify. It makes your life so much easier. You use it everyday to keep track of your expenses, and you’ve even used it to submit reports to your manager. Even your manager loves Expensify! But you’re still wondering how you can get your boss/admin/ceo/accountant/finance dept to adopt Expensify company-wide. While you can always email us to do the work (we’re very persuasive), here are some quick selling points to nudge the powers that be.

Price

Our price is simply unbeatable. Even if that does sound too much like a car salesman, it’s the plain truth. Most online expense reporting products charge between $5 – $10 per user per month, if not more. Expensify bills you $5 per active submitter per month, plus the first two for free. What’s the difference? The “active submitter” part. We only charge you for a user if they actually used the product that month – that is, if they submitted an expense report.

For instance, say you sign up your company of 200 people. At $5/user that’s about $1,000 per month. Whoa there, not all 200 submit expense reports each month, so why would you pay for all 200 of them? If only 20 submit an expense report in a given month, we’ll bill you for only 20 users, because $100 a month is very different than $1,000, and we know that.

Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don’t Lie

Expensify saves your employees time, money, and effort. Let’s say your salesperson earns 50K per year, which translates to roughly $20/hour. It takes them 20 hours and a lot of frustration to fill out the expense report each month. All right, let’s underestimate it to 10 hours. That’s still $20/hour x10 hours = $200. If it takes them 20 minutes to submit a report with Expensify, that’s $20/hour x 0.3hrs = $6, frustration-free. Talk about savings.

More than Pretty

Expensify’s User Interface is constantly praised for its simplicity and ease of use. Even people who struggle with sending an email can successfully navigate Expensify and submit their reports. There’s no rule that says expense reports have to be ugly.

Online

Forget about that envelope stuffed with receipts that just sits on your desk, and staring at it only fills you with dread. No more endless papercuts as you scramble to find that one report your accountant wants to review. You don’t even have to relearn how to use a fax machine anymore! Receipts, eReceipts, credit cards, reports, reimbursement, all one click away.

Organized

Make your expenses look like this without the legwork

Everything is archived digitally and securely in the cloud. This means you’ll never lose that report and you’ll never miss getting reimbursed for an expense because you misplaced that receipt. It’s also easier to search for what you need – no more sifting through that bottomless drawer of files for last year’s expense reports. Filter your expenses, receipts, and reports by date, type, category, and a multitude of other parameters.

Prevents Fraud

Dynamically create charts and graphs on the fly to instantly gather conclusive data of your company’s spending habits. Drill down by date range, category, and even by individual submitter. Why are all of your sales guys spending 15,000 but the last guy is dropping 50,000 per year? With a simple glance at the data you’ll quickly find out.

Plays Nice with Others

Does your accounting department use QuickBooks? Awesome, because Expensify connects to your QB account to sync everything back and forth. Perhaps they use another accounting package? That’s cool too – Expensify allows you to export expenses and reports into CSV, the standard spreadsheet file format, which can be easily imported into other software.

Expensify's Mobile App Army

Mobile Apps

The majority of people who struggle with expense reports are traveling. If you have a hard time remembering to pack your toothbrush, how can we expect you to keep track of that ever-growing pile of receipts while you’re on the go? The Expensify team loves to travel too, so we know how important it is to stay on top of your expense reports with the tools available. That’s why your iPhone, Android, BlackBerry or Palm or any other smartphone are more than enought to keep you afloat while you’re away from home.

Legendary Customer Service

Try emailing any other “online expense reporting solution” with your issues, and note the average response time. If it hovers anywhere near 24 hrs (sometimes even 15 minutes), then we’ve got some competition. Otherwise, it’s a no-brainer.

Receipt Scanning

The newest of Expensify’s features made its debut just a short while ago, and it has already proven to be indispensable for many expense reporting warriors. Nothing else even comes close to the fully integrated receipt scanning, expense management, and expense reporting app we have to offer.

Simply Makes Everyone’s Life Better

Whether your company is using online competitor X for their expense reporting, or scotch taping receipts and faxing them out to the accounting department, let them know that Expensify is out there to make expense reports that don’t suck.

As with any cool company, you gotta have some SWAG (or s.w.a.g, which stands for Stuff We All Get, but can also be Stuff With Our Logo, but that makes it SWOL and it doesn’t sound that cool). Since moving into our awesome new office, the Expensify team has been busy putting our logo on anything that will fit it, whether that anything is practically usable or not. Take a look at some custom swag we’ve made.

Expensify's Mighty Mouse Pad

Expensify Coasters

Of course we got the whole set.

Tote Bags, cause it's cool to be green while promoting your brand

Phone Booth, with a laser etched logo on the glass

And if you look closely at the stemless wine glass, you'll see our laser etched logo at the bottom

This Wednesday, May 11, marks the end of our current milestone. While we are usually quite active about keeping our users up to date on the latest feature developments, you may have noticed a bit of a silent spell this time around. That’s because the Expensify team has been quite busy getting ready for Finovate, “a two-day showcase of cutting-edge financial and banking technology innovations from leading established companies and hot new startups.”

We’ll be demoing a super secret feature that’s been slowly simmering in the Expensify kitchen. Rest assured it’s going to be better, bolder, and bigger than anything out there.

As we polish the finishing touches, we wanted to spread the excitement to every person in expense reporting distress, letting them know that we’re there for them. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you might have noticed a giant Expensify billboard on your way into the city. If you don’t live here, you should come check it out.