(Top 10 Reasons) Why We Work Exclusively With Expensify
Sometimes people ask me why we won’t work with expense software X, and only with Expensify. They say things like:
“Expense functionality is included with X tool we already have.”
(I hear that one a lot.)
“Expensify is expensive.” (That depends.)
“Expense software X does the same thing.” (No, it really doesn’t.)
Expensify is the only tool I’ve personally used that goes deep enough to truly enforce an expense policy, even if it takes some work to get it there. If you’ve clicked around Expensify for ten minutes and decided it wasn’t the most powerful expense reporting tool on the market, you didn’t look hard enough.
And no, before you ask, this is NOT a sponsored post!
Here are the top ten reasons we work exclusively with Expensify for spend management.
1. Policy granularity
Q: Let’s say you want to enforce receipts down to the penny for client reporting reasons. What about parking meters? How do we allow one category to be an exception to the rest of the policy?
A: Expensify allows you to set receipt enforcement, thresholds and individual approvers all at the category level.
And if that’s not flexible enough, Expensify allows you to have multiple policies in the same instance.
2. Complex approvals
Expensify allows approvals to be matrixed across any, each or all of these:
Tags (mapped to accounting dimensions like Customers, Projects, Classes, Locations, etc.)
Categories (yes, each category can have its own approver)
Multilevel approval by amount threshold
Multilevel approval by person
And if all that isn’t enough, Expensify can even prevent self-approval.
3. Tax-compliant per diem & mileage
Expensify allows you to set per diem at as many levels as you want. Want to put the GAO amount for every city in the world, at Full and M&IE rates, and a travel day rate for each? No problem.
And if that’s not enough you can set multiple mileage rates and the app will track mileage with GPS if you want.
4. Receipt enforcement
Expensify not only makes sure a receipt is attached but it reads it to make sure the information on it matches the expense.
This prevents you from uploading a picture of a dragon to submit a report, which I may or may not have done while using Concur at a previous job...
At the time of writing, it can’t deny a credit card stub for a meal, but I’ve requested the feature about 100 times.
5. De Minimis exceptions
Expensify can have policy and category de minimis rules for receipt enforcement (in other words you can set thresholds or categories under which a receipt is not required).
And if that’s not enough you can set the same kinds of thresholds for manual reimbursements.
6. Automation
If the receipt enforcement automation isn’t enough for you, Expensify also has these automations built in:
Policy-level default categories by general grouping (sometimes not helpful for project-based businesses but still cool)
The ability to assign categories to individual Merchant Category Codes are you kidding me???
Automated report submission (if the policy enforcement automation allows it)
Automated report approvals based on the defined policy
Dollar threshold and percent-of-reports checking for manual approvals
Reimbursements (within a user-definable threshold)
7. eReceipts
eReceipts are full digital replacements of their paper equivalents for purchases. This means you can ignore paper receipts entirely, no typing, and no SmartScanning required. Expensify contends they are acceptable supporting docs according to IRS publication 463. I’ve never been involved with an audit using eReceipts but since in most cases they are only available for transactions under $75, I believe the anecdotal evidence that they pass muster.
8. Excellent integrations and open API
One of Tee Lex’s core tenets of technology evaluation is interoperability. Expensify has deep native integrations with the most common accounting packages and an open API that accesses pretty much everything.
If that’s not enough for you, Expensify can create (and save) customized CSV export formats, with all the data in Expensify available to them. You can even customize the data formats.
9. Usability, adoption and support
Expensify has the highest adoption rate I’ve ever seen of any expense tool. I can think of exactly one person who it was assigned to use it that just wouldn’t take, and it was the owner of a company that I don’t think ever even opened the app. The admin side makes my head turn sideways occasionally but the user experience is simple and sleek and the automation happens without fanfare.
And if that’s not enough, when you do have a question there’s a chat bug in every window that a live person answers seemingly 24/7 (at least any time I’ve asked), and if they can't solve it they'll call you.
10. The Expensify Card
I might be biased but the Expensify Card is my favorite spend management system. It offers physical and virtual cards, including customized spend limits, vendor limits and time constraints. It offers some credit (it’s not prepaid) and you can settle the cards daily or monthly. It’s all controlled from a central dashboard.
And if that’s not enough, Expensify allows you to work with Expensify Cards, traditional credit cards and reimbursements all in the same system with the same workflows.
Trying to make a top ten list and keep this under a thousand words I can’t tell you EVERYTHING that I love about Expensify but hopefully this is enough to make you curious or explains why we insist on using it.
We’re an ExpensifyApproved! Accountants firm, so if you have questions about implementing Expensify in your business drop me a line at joe@teelexinc.com.