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Archives For November 30, 1999

Introducing SmartScans and Clarifying eReceipts…

David Barrett —  January 26, 2012 — Leave a comment

Hello, I hope you’re recovering nicely from your New Year’s festivities and are ready to take this year by storm. I just wanted to take a moment to clarify a couple of things to help make sure 2012 goes smooth:

1) That cool scanning system we introduced in May? It’s now officially cool enough to warrant its own name: SmartScan. Just like before it automatically extracts the merchant, amount, and date from uploaded receipt images. But now it has a fancy name and a much more detailed help page, including tips on how to capture images that produce the best results:

https://www.expensify.com/help/receipts/smartscan

2) Like before you get 10 for free, but now your free quota refills every month! So if you run out and don’t feel like buying more (at the same price, $0.20 each), just wait until next month and you’ll get 10 more for free.

3) We’ve switched from a “prepaid” model (eg, buy scans before you use them) to a “post-pay” model: just upgrade your account to Professional, provide a credit card when prompted, and we’ll bill you for any SmartScans above 10 at the end of the month.

4) Finally, for all this hoopla about SmartScans, I want to remind you: eReceipts are even better. Imported directly from your bank account so no typing *or* scanning required. More information here:

https://www.expensify.com/help/receipts/ereceipts

I’m slowly churning through the final hundred or so responses to the last newsletter, but I’m always extremely eager for more. Please let me know if I can clarify anything about the above, or help in any way. Thanks for using Expensify, and I look forward to talking with you soon!

-david
Founder and CEO of Expensify
Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/expensify

 

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New Year Resolution: More Free SmartScans, Simpler Billing

 —  January 1, 2012 — Leave a comment

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!

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