Archives For November 30, 1999

Looking back on the year, one of our major accomplishments in 2011 was releasing SmartScanning – the option to have our system pick out the details of an expense from the image of its receipt. Many of you jumped right on board and started feeding our app with your receipts, sharing the goodness with your friends. Towards the end of the year, we reached a critical mass and made SmartScanning completely free until 2012 to really put our system to the test.

Expensify's Mobile and Web based receipt scanning

Now, after processing hundreds of thousands of SmartScanned images, we have learned a lot and fixed mistakes that couldn’t have otherwise been predicted.  As we continue to learn and find ways to improve, changes like increasing accuracy, and decreasing scanning time will make their way in to the system.  Some of the planned changes though are forward facing and more immediate:

  • More free! Many of you have just a few receipts to deal with every month and there’s no good reason for us to hobble you just to eek out a few extra pennies. Instead of giving each account 10 free SmartScans, we now replenish them and give each account 10 free SmartScans each and every month!
  • End of month billing. Just like your utilities, your phone and most any other usage based service, it makes sense to receive a total for all of your activity at the end of the month. Any receipts which are SmartScanned above the free monthly quota will now be billed to you at the end of the month.

With these changes on the horizon, the high level pitch and functionality remain the same: SmartScanning will take any uploaded receipt and pick out the date, merchant and purchase amount from the image.  The SmartScanned information is used to create a line item expense entry for that receipt, or to attach it to a matching credit card purchase.  Any SmartScans used above the free monthly quota will be billed at only 20¢ each at the end of the month.  Learn more about SmartScans.

Happy Scanning in 2012!

Centralized billing for expense policies

 —  November 1, 2010 — 1 Comment

A lot of you have been asking for a way to pay for all of your employees use of the app from one account, regardless of who is approving their expense reports. In keeping with making things a little better each and every day, we’ve just released centralized billing which lets you do just that.  At the end of each month, we’ll charge the billing card associated with your account for the active users from each expense policy that you own.

Wondering how centralized billing works?

  • If you have previously created an expense policy, only the billing card tied to the policy owner’s account will be used to pay for the use and approvals of everyone part of that policy.
  • Any newly created expense policy will be tied to the billing card associated with your account by default.
  • Any administrators part of a policy can take over paying for it at any time by going to the billing tab of the policy they want to take over.  Once a person takes over paying for a policy, they will become that policy’s owner.

All of this makes central billing incredibly powerful, eliminates the confusion of who pays, and adds an entire new level of flexibility to creating workflows without a rigid report approval structure.  The person getting billed will still get 2 free users each month across all of the policies they pay for and, as always, there are no contacts to sign. You are free to use our app for as long as you need to with the option to cancel billing at any time.

Find out more about our pricing and billing options here