People download the Expensify app for all kinds of reasons: accountants looking for a better (read: less shoebox-shaped) way to collect receipts from clients, employees sick of submitting taped receipts to their boss, and even individuals who just want an easy way to track how often they’re eating Taco Bell (me; too often). One of the major challenges we’ve faced is how to ensure that Expensify works for everyone without requiring tedious configuration. Enter Inbox. Continue Reading…
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As Expensify has grown up, we’ve put more and more energy into adding functionality to give admins more control over how employees interact with Expensify. Today, we’re happy to announce that we fully support SAML single sign-on via both our website and mobile app. We can work with any identity provider, such as OneLogin and Okta, as long as they support SAML 2.0. Continue Reading…
In previous Expensify blog posts you may have heard us refer to WOW Fridays. Every Friday at Expensify, we allow our engineers the freedom to work on projects of their choosing, that aren’t necessarily part of our immediate product roadmap. We do this in order to allow them to exercise their creative freedom with the benefit that we end up with some really cool additions to the product. Well, the latest product of WOW Fridays is here: Continue Reading…
As we continue towards our major realtime expense reporting push, we are continuing to streamline the Expensify product. This started with simplifying our pricing structure and now involves changing the way report submission and approval works for those people using Expensify outside of an expense policy. When users submit reports outside of an expense policy, the reports are now moved to the “closed” state and shared with the person the report was submitted to. The recipient of the report still has the ability to approve the report by moving the report to a policy. Continue Reading…
We are very happy to announce that our Reconciliation and Central Administration feature is now available for American Express corporate cards. Because the feature was such a hit with commercial card holders, we decided to develop for Corporate cards as well. Continue Reading…
One of the things we pride ourselves on at Expensify is flexibility. Our users have a very diverse set of needs and our goal is to find a simple solution that meets all of them. While the QuickBooks integration that we have built is great for most users, we realize that some people like an extra level of customization. This is why we are taking the time to let you know about this custom QuickBooks integration option.
QuickBooks is by far the most popular small business accounting software out there and is used by quite a few Expensify users. We wanted to take a moment to outline some best practices for the large constituency of QuickBooks accountants using Expensify.
Best practice #1: Export reports after reimbursing
If your company does reimbursement through Expensify, we recommend exporting reports after they have been reimbursed. This way the information that is reflected is most up-to-date and accurate. Otherwise, you will end up with a bunch of payables in QuickBooks that you will need to go in and manually reconcile.
Best practice #2: Remove any remnants of the Intuit App Center
Expensify used to offer the option to integrate with QuickBooks through the Intuit App Center. We recently discontinued this integration, so it is important to remove any remnants of this from your Expensify account. This includes deleting any secondary logins associated with the app center.
Best practice #3: Deleting and re-adding your connection
Whenever having problems with your QuickBooks connection in Expensify, the first thing to try is always to delete and re-add the connection. Sometimes the Intuit auth-token can timeout, causing the connection to break. In this scenario, simply deleting and re-adding the connection will fix the problem.
Additionally, in the case that there is a real problem, this allows us to identify and remedy any possible issues more quickly. When diagnosing issues in the integration, we need to start with a clean slate provided by readding the connection.
Best practice #4: Use customers/jobs for tags with billable expenses
If your company has billable expenses, you will want to use customers/jobs as tags. Expensify won’t be able to export billable expenses to QuickBooks unless there is a customer/job associated with each expense, so we recommend enabling customers/jobs as tags.
That’s it for today! As always, if you have any questions about anything QuickBooks related, please do shoot us an email at help@expensify.com.
One of Expensify’s most popular features is its direct integration with QuickBooks. Expensify is able to integrate with both QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online. Here are some things to make sure to be aware of when setting up your connection:
- Information is not automatically exported from Expensify to QuickBooks; the export must be triggered by the user. Visit our QuickBooks export page to learn about exporting expense reports to QuickBooks.
- Expensify does not edit your QuickBooks company file. Expense accounts can be imported into Expensify to use as categories, but categories and tags created in Expensify will not be added to your QuickBooks company file. New expense accounts will need to be created in QuickBooks.
- When new accounts are added to your QuickBooks company file, you will need to update the connection in Expensify. You can do this by going to Settings > Connections and clicking “update now”.
- Typically, the best way to manage multiple QuickBooks companies within one Expensify account is to create a separate expense policy for each company.
- It is important to always be logged into QuickBooks as the master admin (single user mode) when connecting with Expensify.
- Intuit currently does not support the ability to connect with the Mac copy of QuickBooks Desktop. Specifically, the QuickBooks Web Connector is not supported on the Mac. You can, however, connect to QuickBooks Online using any operating system.
As always, please feel free to email us at help@expensify.com if you have any questions about setting up your Expensify-QuickBooks connection!
Here at Expensify we are always trying to use the best of the web. We use cutting edge technology
to offer the best experience possible to our users.
Unfortunately, not everybody can enjoy the benefits that these new technologies offer because not all browsers support them.One of these browsers is Internet Explorer. The latest version of Internet Explorer is great, but the popularity of older versions makes our work very hard.
At Expensify, we target mainly Google Chrome. It is fast, secure and always up to date. At the same time, we understand that not everybody wants to install Google Chrome, or can because of their company’s policies. We try to balance between having a great product and making sure Expensify is working well with all browsers.
Google offers a great solution for Internet Explorer Users: Google Chrome Frame.
Google Chrome Frame is an open source plug-in that seamlessly brings Google Chrome’s open web technologies and speedy JavaScript engine to any version of Internet Explorer.
You can install Chrome Frame on your Windows computer using Internet Explorer 6, 7 , 8 and 9.
Google Chrome Frame gets updated automatically and silently without prompting. You don’t need to be an administrator on your computer to install it.
To enjoy the best of Expensify we highly recommend installing it.
For more information on the drawbacks of older versions of IE, I recommend Smashing Magazine’s article on upgrading web browsers.
The people section of your company expense policy can sometimes be confusing to set up. In this blog post, I will go over what the various fields mean as well as a few examples of how your people section can be set up.
Email: everyone is designated in Expensify by their email address.
Submits to: This is who the expense reports will be first submitted to. Employees who don’t approve expense reports will only have their “submits to” field filled (no one in their “forwards to” field).
Forwards to: Only approvers will have their “forwards to” line filled. This line designates who expense reports should be forwarded to for further approval.
Admin: Being an admin of an expense policy gives you the ability to change policy settings, add/remove people to the policy, and view any report that has been submitted within the policy.
The following are examples of how this will look when set up correctly.
Example 1:
For this example we will say that there are 3 groups of people involved in the company.
Employees only submit expense reports; they have no approving powers. Their expense reports are submitted to their manager who forwards them on for further approval. Employees have their manager in the “submits to” field and no one in their “forwards to” field.
Managers approve employee expense reports and submit reports of their own. They forward the reports they receive to accounting after approval and send their own personal expense reports directly to accounting as well. They have accounting in both their “submits to” and “forwards to” fields.
Accounting does not submit any expense reports. They receive all expense reports. For accounting we will go ahead and put accounting in the “submits to” field because they will not be submitting expense reports to anyone. Accounting will have no one in their “forwards to” field because they are the final approver (they don’t forward reports to anyone).
Example 2:
In this example we will still have 3 groups of people. The only difference is that instead of having managers submit their own personal expense reports directly to accounting, they are submitted to another manager for first approval and then forwarded to accounting.
In this case the Manager 1’s “submits to” field will have Manager 2. Everything else will stay the same.
If you have any questions about setting up your approval workflow please feel free to contact us at help@expensify.com!
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