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Archives For November 30, 1999

How Do You (Learn) Expensify?

garrettmknight —  September 28, 2012 — 1 Comment

As some of you may know, we here at Expensify go on an offshore trip every year. This trip is a very valuable time for us to re-gel as a team and focus on our plans for world domination the coming 12 months. This time around we’ve decided we’re headed to Thailand. For a closer look at our M.O. on offshores and past trips, check out our Offshore Trips page.

What does this mean for our users?

First (and only), we will not be hosting our live workshops for this month as the time change would make this outrageously inconvenient. We will still be available anytime by email to help with anything and everything Expensify. Please feel free to contact us at help@expensify.com if you have any clarifying questions about our support.

To atone for our lack of workshops, we’ve put together this post denoting how to learn about and use Expensify.

For Individual Users and Employees

  1. Watch a pre-recorded version of our Using Expensify workshop. This demonstrates the basics of adding your expenses, creating reports, and submitting them for approval/reimbursement.
  2. We’ve also put together an overview of what you need to get started with Expensify. You’ll find it here.
  3. Search our robust, detailed Help site for information any outstanding and immediate queries you have about our features.
  4. Didn’t find the answer to your question? Ask us. Email help@expensify.com and we’ll happily clear anything up for you.

For Company Inquiries and Setup

  1. Consult our Upgrade page to choose the plan that is right for you.
  2. Follow our step-by-step Company Setup guide on creating your company expense policy and inviting your users.
  3. Along with our Company Setup help page you’ll find documentation on all of our company features in our Help section.
  4. Curious about trialling Expensify for your company? Check our our How Do You (Trial) Expensify blog post.
  5. For any further questions or clarification, email us at help@expensify.com.
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Pro-tip: Receipts vs. Report Attachments

garrettmknight —  September 17, 2012 — Leave a comment

You can add receipt images to your reports with or without expense information. Depending on the information you’ve added to your receipts, you’ll find them in different locations of your report.

Receipt Thumbnails

Receipt images added to a report with corresponding expense information are listed in the expenses list and the Receipt Thumbnails section immediately below it.

Report Attachments

Report Attachments are images added to a report that are not attached to an expense and do not contain minimum expense information. Minimum expense information includes a Merchant Name, Date, and Amount. Without these distinctions, receipt images will be added to the Attachments section of a report. Why attach an image without any expense information? Report Attachments serve as supporting documentation for the expense report. The most common uses of the Report Attachment are pre-approval documents and insurance forms, but you can utilize this feature for any of your supporting documentation needs.

While this distinction is basic, it’s definitely a good thing to know when putting your report together. If you have any questions about Report Attachments, Receipt Thumbnails, or any of our features please feel free to contact our support team at help@expensify.com.

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Pro Tips Monday: Using Bill.com

 —  February 20, 2012 — Leave a comment

Update: We have actually created a connection with Bill.com that will allow you to submit to Bill.com as part of your policy. Please check out our Submit to Bill.com help page for more info.

Do you or your company use Bill.com? Have you thought about using it but you wanted to make sure that you could integrate your Expensify account with it? Well good news, you can!

If you don’t know about Bill.com – Bill.com is a great platform to streamline and automate vendor bill payment and customer invoicing. To read more about them, visit their site: http://www.bill.com

Once you have created your company specific Bill.com email address, you will then use that to send your company’s expense reports. When a report has been approved and is ready to send, you will use one of our features in the Reports tab, the ‘share with accountant’ button across the top row:

Screen Shot 2013-06-27 at 11.10.43 AM

Once you click that button, you will then see the option to send this report to your @bill.com email address you have already set up.

The ‘share with accountant’ button will remember the last email address that you used for each policy. So if you have multiple policies, you will only have to enter the email address for each policy once.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to email Help@expensify.com, tweet at us: @Expensify or just send us a smoke signal.


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Pro Tips Monday: Exporting to QuickBooks Desktop (yes, one more time)

 —  February 6, 2012 — 9 Comments

Recently, I have been receiving a lot of emails asking for help on how to sync Expensify with QuickBooks – so I have the need to re-blog this.In case if you still have questions, we do have a very detailed, step by step guide in our help section as mentioned above (www.expensify.com/help/quickbooks) as well as a weekly Webinar every Friday at 11:30am PST that will go over how to establish this connection and every possible other connection to your account package supported by Expensify. To register for that, click on any of the following links:

 

QuickBooks is an amazingly powerful tool.  It can be configured (and misconfigured) countless ways.  But the high level concept of how to export from Expensify to QuickBooks desktop is relatively straightforward.  There are a bunch of detailed instructions in our help section, but here’s a quick step-by-step guide — feel free to print it out so you can follow along.

Phase 1: Clean up your account
First, if you’ve already started exporting and it’s not working for you for some reason, I suggest cleaning up your account so we can start over from scratch.  Don’t worry: you won’t lose any data or affect your QuickBooks company file or Expensify reports in any way — this just removes any old connections so we can rebuild them from scratch.

  1. Sign in to Expensify using the https://expensify.comlink (eg, do notsign in via Intuit Workplace). This just keeps things easy.
  2. Click “Settings” in the upper right, then “Connections” on the left, and click “delete” next to any existing QuickBooks connections. This won’t affect your data, but it will just disconnect it from your Expensify account.
  3. Remove your “Intuit” secondary login. Just more cleanup. Click “Settings” in the upper-right, then “Account” on the left, and click “[remove]” next to any “intuit” line in the “Secondary Logins” section.

Phase 2: Connect to QuickBooks and export the report
Next, let’s go set up a new connection to QuickBooks using the QuickBooks web connector, and then export our first report.

  1. Shut down QuickBooks, QuickBooks web connector, or essentially anything Intuit or QuickBooks-related on your desktop.
  2. Close all web browsers.
  3. Open a new web browser (I strongly recommend Google Chrome).
  4. Sign in to the Expensify website direct using this link: https://expensify.com
    • Note: Do NOT sign in via Intuit Workplace, Intuit App Center, or by clicking anything inside of QuickBooks. This is an advanced feature.
  5. Click “Reports” at the top of the Expensify site.
  6. Click the name of the report you want to export.
    • If there are no reports here, click “new report” and create one for testing — add at least one expense to it by clicking “new expense”. Basically, expenses needed to be added to a report before they can be exported to QuickBooks.
  7. Click “export to…” along the top.  If there is no “export to…” button:
    • If someone else submitted this to you, click “approve” first, and choose “final approve”.
    • If you created this report, click “archive” first.
  8. Choose the company you want to export to.
    • If no companies are listed, follow these instructions.
    • When done, go back to step (1) and start over.
  9. Review the export options — this explains exactly where the data will be put inside QuickBooks.
  10. Click “export” at the bottom.
  11. Open the QuickBooks company file on your desktop.
  12. Open the QuickBooks Web Connector by clicking “File -> Update Web Services” inside QuickBooks.
    • If it doesn’t open, reboot computer and try again.
    • If it still doesn’t open, call Intuit (888-222-7276).
  13. Verify the Expensify connection is selected.
  14. Click “Updated Selected”
  15. This will cause QuickBooks to connect to Expensify and download the information into QuickBooks. When it reaches 100%, it should be done!

And that should do it.  It’s not exactly a painless process, but it’s an incredibly powerful one!

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Pro Tip Monday: Domain Control

 —  January 16, 2012 — 3 Comments

You’ve finished implementing Expensify across your entire company when your boss walks in and tells you that you will need to have more control with the users under your company’s Expensify account… You might be thinking to yourself at this point, “How am I going to do that?!?” Don’t worry; we’ve got you covered!

We have this amazing feature called Domain Control to help make everyone on your team happy (including your boss!).  Domain Control enables you to manage user accounts that are part of your company’s divisions. With a domain under your control, you’re able to:

  • require strict enforcement of rules,
  • disable select features
  • delete user accounts

Disclaimer: These abilities are powerful, use them wisely!

Before you get started, make sure that you are on the Corporate Plan.  If you’re not, then just click here and upgrade.  Next, head over to your Settings page, and click the Domain Control tab to the left. This is where you will add your domain.

You will then need to verify ownership of this domain before continuing. You may need to consult your organization’s IT department to complete the verification process… so make sure you get them a cup of coffee before you ask.

You have two very simple methods to verify your domain: Host a File or Add a DNS record.

Once your domain is verified you will now be in control!

With Domain Control, you will have the ability to create and monitor what we call Permission Groups.  Permission Groups are an easy way to group your employees, and let you monitor what they are able to do or not do within Expensify. You can give the Permission Groups you have created any combination of the enforcements/restrictions we have made:

Once you have created all the Permission Groups needed for your company, you can begin to Add Domain Members (read as: this is where you add your employees).

You will use their email address to identify who each of your co-workers are. Once they are added, you will be able to declare what Permission Group they belong to, as well as who is an Administrator.

Don’t worry, you will be able to go back and edit these fields whenever you would like to, provided you are still the admin!

You can learn about this and more by visiting our help section at https://www.expensify.com/help or email Omar@Expensify.com!

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Expensify Announces One-Millionth Receipt Processed, Introduces Automatic Receipt Scanning, Categorization

 —  May 11, 2011 — 2 Comments

We’re using the stage Finovate Spring today to announce automatic receipt scanning and credit card association, along with self-tuning expense categorization that learns from user behavior. Check out what our official press release has to say:

“Expensify has been storing receipt images for a while, and recently received our one-millionth uploaded receipt,” says David Barrett, Founder and CEO of Expensify. “But we’re only just now starting to actively process those images to track and report expenses without any typing.”

With this new feature, receipt images are scanned upon upload such that the merchant name, sales date, and purchase amount are automatically read from the receipt image without any user interaction. Additionally, receipts that correspond to purchases on a credit card imported into Expensify are automatically associated with the matching expense. Finally, the category of the expense is automatically derived from information in the expense and past activity by the user.

“There are some services big and small that provide elements of this new feature,” adds David. “But only Expensify offers end-to-end expense report automation by combining receipt scanning, credit-card association, and self-tuning categorization.”

This new feature will be fully compatible with all past uploaded receipts, whether through Expensify’s iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, or webOS applications; sent to receipts@expensify.com; or uploaded through a web browser at https://www.expensify.com.

Learn more about receipt scanning!

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IRS rev’s up reimbursable mileage rate for 2011

 —  January 18, 2011 — Leave a comment

Each year the IRS updates the reimbursable mileage rate for business travel to reflect the costs for operating a vehicle. With prices going up, you are now able to claim $0.51 per mile travelled in 2011. Check out the full details on the rate change at IRS.gov.

Missed logging a few trips this past year? We’ve got plenty of ways for you to make up for it this year!

Log mileage…

  • From your phone!

    Get any of our mobile apps and log your travel by entering in miles as the merchant and how far you drove as the amount.

  • With an email!

    Add how far you traveled and the word miles to the subject line of an email and shoot it off to receipts@expensify.com.

  • With a map!

    Create a new mileage expense directly from our site and click to show the map – enter in your start, end and any points in between to recreate a visual receipt for your travel.

However you choose to log your miles, we’ll make sure they’re converted to the rate you specify on the preferences tab of your settings page. For everyone still working on your 2010 expenses – make sure to update the mileage rate for the new year once you’re done!

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All the money in the world

 —  December 2, 2010 — Leave a comment

Doing business in places others haven’t heard of? While we may not know where you are either, rest assured that we’ve got your expense needs covered – your purchases can now be recorded in any of 159 currencies.

Any expense in a foreign currency will automatically be converted to your home currency once added to a report. We use Oanda, the touchstone foreign exchange rate calculator used by corporations, tax authorities, auditing firms, and financial institutions worldwide, to do the currency conversion based on the day’s exchange rate when the expense was incurred. Check out the full list of supported foreign currencies on our currency conversion help page.

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Expensify Leads, Competitors Follow

David Barrett —  November 10, 2010 — 2 Comments

They say imitation is the highest form of flattery. But when it comes from competition… what does that even mean? Take our award-winning job post, whose intro includes this line:

“We’re getting crushed under an ever-growing pile of super awesome work, and I need one bright soul to help us dig our way out. I can guarantee you fun, an amazing opportunity to learn, and the siren’s call of distant riches.”

A competitor — let’s call them “ExpenseFog” — posts the following *three days later*:

“We’re getting hammered by an explosion of users loving our product and we need a hero to come to the rescue. I can guarantee you an amazing opportunity to learn from some of the smartest engineers and business people LA has to offer. Plus an amazing opportunity to make money.”

Seriously dude? Write your own frickin’ job post.

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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

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