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Funny how the most obvious things slip by. You might recall that we just released a new "Mileage (and other unit) support" feature. It just occurred to me that a perfect use of this "other unit" functionality is foreign currencies, duh! It's so incredibly obvious, naturally I'd only realize it once I had the need to log a cash expense in Turkish Lira. So to do that I simply:
From the mailing list:
It's been a couple months since our last update, but I'm very proud to announce something we've all been waiting for: the Expensify iPhone Application is finally here! I know you thought we were making it up all along (and at times it felt like a dream), but the vapor has finally taken shape and you can download it today!
As you might know, you've always been able to take pictures of receipts and email them to receipts@expensify.com for inclusion with expense reports. This application streamlines it even further for iPhone users such that you can take pictures and upload straight to your account, over wifi or 3G, skipping email entirely. So download it today and give it a shot!
We've been so busy we haven't spent a lot of time communicating with you (sorry about that!) but here's a quick update:
And of course we've released a ton of minor fixes under the hood, and are laying the foundation for some even more significant changes down the road. So we might have been quiet, but we sure have been busy!
That's right, we just doubled the company! Granted, that's not terribly hard when you only have two people to start, but think of it this way: if we can do all this with just two guys, just think what we'll be able to do with two more!
So there's a lot going on over here at Expensify world headquarters, and I'll try to do a better job in the future of keeping you informed. In the meantime, just keep filing expense reports and we'll keep getting you reimbursed, faster and easier every day!
- David Barrett (dbarrett@expensify.com, Twitter: @expensify)
As I wrote about previously, Expensify is doing (what I believe to be) some pretty innovative Twitter marketing. However, from the very start we realized there's a delicate line between marketing and spam, so we set out some early rules to ensure we're on the right side of the line:
1) Keep it personal. Only send messages from real people, to real people. Leave the faceless boxes on Google and maintain the social foundation of Twitter.That said, we were afraid then that others would cross the line, and it appears that's happening with increasing frequency. Alas.
2) Keep it timely. A huge benefit of Twitter is you can go straight the people who are experiencing the problem at that exact moment. Leave the huge backlog of past posters alone and stay focused on the present.
3) Keep it relevant. The temptation is overwhelming to just blast this out to everybody. But resist that temptation and focus on the people who are actually calling out for your thing.
Today I did my first real expense report with Expensify. I know, I know, I've been doing them all along, here and there. But there's a huge difference between "testing" and "using". And having really "used" it for the first time, I have to say, I'm really quite proud of what we've built. This thing really works, really well.
Basically, I'm as lazy as anybody else. I put things off. I buy things with a few different cards, am undisciplined with email and paper receipts, pay cash unnecessarily. I'm as bad as anybody else. But having just processed about six months of backlogged expenses, I've learned a few lessons:
- Get a dedicated purchase card. I know I've been preaching it from the start, but seriously. Do it. I mean, I have one (two, actually: Work and Play, both backed by my regular credit card), and I've been using it only for business purchase. But I've mistakenly been making both reimbursable and non-reimbursable expenses with the same card. Bad call. Here on out, my Work card is exclusively for reimbursable work expenses. I'm a reformed man.Basically, all that stuff I'm out promising people -- I always knew it was true, but now I *feel* it. I know it's true, and it really is quite amazing.
- Expensify Guaranteed eReceipts are frickin' amazing. I mean, I never, ever keep paper receipts anymore. I don't even think of them. It's like that entire pain point has just gone away. It's one thing to tell people about it. But it's another thing entirely to actually feel it.
- Email receipts work amazingly well. Just forward them to receipts@expensify.com and they're stored serverside as PDF images, and then drag them onto the corresponding expense to associate.
- Use the SMS text interface for taxis. Being a proud car-less San Franciscan, I take a lot of taxis. I usually pay cash. So I always send Expensify a text message when I get out, something like "$5 - taxi to meeting with blah". Man, this is a lifesaver. I'd have never remembered all of those, and despite a big stack of blank taxi receipts in my pocket, I'd never know how much I should get reimbursed.
- Online reimbursement is soooo handy. I love having a permanent record of exactly who was paid what, with the ability to dig in and see exactly what was paid for.
- Better sorting and filtering. When I sat down to get started, I have over a thousand individual purchases to sift through, combining work expenses imported off my Work card (both reimbursable and non-reimbursable, arrg!), personal and work expenses on my personal credit card, and a bunch of other random purchases pulled in from my fiancée due to our joint account. Thats a whole lot of needles in a pretty huge haystack. Overall, even with today's functionality, it was pretty easy. But I can see a lot of ways to make it easier still.And of course a million more small things. I have countless ideas how to improve it further, to get ever closer to the holy grail of "one click expense report" for all users in all scenarios.
- Better archiving of non-reimbursable expenses. An oft-requested feature is the ability to just save a report for future reference. You can sorta do that today by submitting it to yourself, but it's really a bit of a pain. Some "Save report" function would be handy.
- Better report management. I've got a ton of reports to myself, to others, and a bunch in there just for testing -- and it can get confusing fast. Some kind of multi-report analytics would be super helpful.
- Better note taking. I've been renting a lot of Zipcars recently, and they all just show up with an anonymous "Zipcar" merchant name -- without any hint of where I went or why. But in there was one time I rented it for personal reasons. Trying to sort out which was the personal one was a huge pain. We should have some way to add comments to expenses using SMS -- even non-cash expenses -- so you can make these notes as you go.
Also, I should note that when you upload receipts as HTML or text emails (or even upload them as original PDFs), we store them securely on our server as both a high-resolution PDF and a low-resolution JPG thumbnail. We typically only show the JPG, but your always welcome to go back and download the full PDF in all it's glory. Just click on the receipt on the home or receipt page, then click "Download as PDF" in the upper-right corner:
So we've been absolutely flooded with users and that's a great problem to have! One of the (surprisingly few) areas of problem was with receipts: you'd be amazed how many formats email receipts can come in. But we're steadily learning how to handle them all, and we've a major new trick up our sleeve: embedded images!
That's right, now if you forward us an HTML receipt that has images in it, we'll render the images in full glorious color. For example, here's what it looks like when I upload an Orbitz reminder that Athens was in the midst of riots when we recently visited:
After months of hundreds of beta testers pouring over every nook and cranny, it's time: as of Wednesday, March 11th at 8am PST, Expensify has opened its doors to all comers! That's right, as of now, we are in "open beta", so sign up now and encourage everyone you know to follow!
If you already know what Expensify is, then don't bother reading this blog: just go to http://expensify.com and get started. Or, if you're looking for a three-minute refresher, watch this video. Otherwise if you're looking for a bit more detail on what we're all about, here goes:
1) Import your credit card; no more data entryThe Expensify Way is the fast and easy way. Import your expenses and receipts, submit in one click, reimburse online. Before today, it was the way expense reports should work. But now, it's the way they do work. If you're still stuck in expense report hell, why not find salvation today?
If you already have a credit card, great! Expensify imports expenses from 94% of US credit cards. That means no typing into Excel or ancient web forms: just enter your credit card details and we'll import straight from your banking website into our PCI-compliant datacenter.
Alternatively, if you don't have a credit card, or have one but don't like mixing business and personal expenses on the same card, we can help you get a corporate card that imports its expenses straight into Expensify.
2) Import your receipts; no more paper receipts
Not only does Expensify import your expenses, we also create Guaranteed eReceipts for purchases under $75. Guaranteed eReceipts comply with all IRS regulations for documenting purchases (we guarantee it), so you can literally throw away 80% of your paper receipts.
Of the remaining 20%, most are online purchases such as plane tickets or hotel reservations -- just forward the email receipt to receipts@expensify.com and we'll take care of it.
For those few paper receipts that remain, just use your cameraphone and send a picture of your receipt to receipts@expensify.com. (Or use our iPhone App, once Apple gets around to approving it...)
The upshot is we can literally do away with paper receipts.
3) Submit in one click; no more printing and stapling
In just one click we'll take all your expenses, subtotal them by expense category, attach your uploaded and eReceipts, and construct a full, ready-to-send expense report. Enter any email address and we'll send a PDF containing the completed expense report, receipts and all, along with a form to reimburse it.
4) Reimburse online; no more trips to the bank
Pay or get paid from or your checking account or credit card, online. Or mark it approved and get paid through regular channels (payroll, wire transfer, etc), or even reject it and send it back with comments.
Ok, that didn't really work, how about *this* one... Ain't technology great?
- David Barrett
Twitter: @quinthar
So we've moved the Expensify blog from quinthar.com over to Facebook. To simplify the transition, I'm just going to cross-post the subset of my Quinthar blog that relates to Expensify to the new Expensify blog on Facebook. This is a test to see if that works...
- David Barrett
Twitter: @quinthar
So I've been doing the twitter stuff for a while and I've been liking it, but it doesn't really scale up by the orders of magnitude I'd like. It brings in dozens of clicks a day, but I want thousands.
(Incidentally, I finally filtered out all the Twitter bots -- conversion is still incredibly high. The technique works amazingly well.)
Naturally, for those thousands of clicks a day I'd go to AdWords. I know I can't afford that, but I'm curious what it would cost. So I set up a series of keywords and set a small test ad budget, with the thought that I'd instantly be flooded with clicks and my ad budget depleted within minutes, but at least I'd get the data I need.
Days pass, and not a single ad was shown. I check everything, add some more keywords, verify my billing is set up, remove my $2.00/click maximum, and try again. Still nothing.
I'm thinking WTF. So I dig around a bit more and find this keyword estimator and I find some really surprising results:
Even if I threw unlimited money at the problem, I would only get between 86-111 clicks a day, at a cost of $230-380/day. That's $2.67 - $3.42 per click on average, and still it's such an insignificant flow of users it's not even worth the effort.
In other words, the technique I'm using with Twitter not only converts far better than AdWords, it does it way cheaper and is in fact *easier* to use.
And on top of all that, let me throw another datapoint at those readers who are concerned that my Twitter technique is spam: we get about 4x more "thanks for the link!" responses than we do complaints. And given the general addage that people are 10x more likely to complain than thank you, that means between 4-40x more people are actually appreciative of our contact than upset.
Given that you can't please everyone, pleasing 40x more people than you upset is about as good as you can do.
The upshot is this: Twitter is sitting on a massive goldmine. Indeed, my data suggests that Tweets are far more monetizable than searches, and users will actually thank you for it.
Will that scale? Unknown. We adhere zealously to the Twitter Promotion Code of Conduct I outlined earlier, and I imagine there will be a flood of people who aren't so kind who will in all probability ruin it for the rest of us.
Until then, there's gold in them thar' hills, so go on out and grab it!
- David Barrett
Twitter: @quinthar
I know I've been quiet on the Expensify front, but not for lack of things to say: just waiting for the right time to say them. Regardless, I'll break radio silence to share an interesting piece of news: Expensify was recommended by Inc. Magazine as the "first class" way to manage expenses over a couple other products. (Which were listed as "business class" and "coach", respectively. Ouch!) Check it out: January issue, page 44. What a nice New Year's treat!
- David Barrett
Expensify isn't so much a labor of love as it is a retaliation against paper expense reports.
Don't get me wrong: making business purchases doesn't phase me. I'm fine buying tickets, renting cars, booking hotels, and generally getting things done on my own credit card. But the process of getting paid back is just so excruciating.
I'm not sure which is the worst: keeping track of the receipts, typing it all in, waiting to receive the check, or actually depositing it once I get it. The whole experience is so bad it blurs together into a general morass of pain. It's so bad I find myself just paying for things out of pocket because that's preferable to the torturous process of getting reimbursed.
This has been the case for years, and as I clawed my way up the startup circuit, I always rather assumed the big companies had some magical solution that made it all easy. Well, they don't. It's horrible from top to bottom, and what few corporate card solutions exist are targeted squarely at the big guys. I've got news for you: there are 25 million businesses in the US today, and 24 million of those have under 20 employees. That means 97% of the market is has been neatly overlooked, leaving the rest of us in expense report hell.
Well, I'm proud to say that all that ends now. Expensify is the corporate card for everyone else, the expense report service that not only pays you back faster, but pays you back *more* -- and does so without the grueling pain we've all come to associate with the words "expense report".
In case you don't already know, Expensify uses electronic payment cards to enable one-click expense reports. Every purchase you make with the card we give you is billed back to your regular credit card -- there's no new monthly bill, and you keep all your frequent flier miles. Come back to the site at any time to print out full expense reports (including receipts: just scan them in with our iPhone app or email them to receipts@expensify.com using any cameraphone), or type in your manager's email address and we'll mail them a PDF and bill them for the amount of the expense report, crediting it back to your credit card. No checks to cash, no days to wait, we'll just instantly pay off your credit card when your boss approves the report.
Anyway, you might have heard we launched last week at the TechCrunch 50 and Wow. What a response. We were cautiously optimistic that people would like it -- we were unprepared for how much people would absolutely *love* it. We pitched it over 150 times, and everyone was ecstatic. One guy even gave me a hug as thanks for how much time we were going to save him. I think he had a tear in his eye.
All this enthusiasm has really highlighted to us just how big a problem we're solving, and how important it is that our launch go smooth. So as much as it pains me, we've decided to slow things down a bit and put some extra testing and polish into the site, and to send out our cards in smaller batches than initially anticipated. We'll still send them out on a first-come first-serve basis, and once we're through the backlog our plan is still to get cards to your door within a week. But we're going to take our time with these first batches to ensure the highest quality experience possible.
That said, we want to thank you, the TechCrunch crew, and most importantly all the many, many people who spoke with us at the TechCrunch 50 and gave us such kind words of support and encouragement -- not to mention voted us 2nd place winner of the Demo Pit over a hundred other companies. And what better way to give thanks than with cold hard cash!
That's right, from this moment on, the next 1000 users who sign up will get $1000 in free purchases. That's a cool million dollars of Expensify service we're giving away for free to you, the early adopters, the TechCrunch readers, and the fledgling group of Expensify fans who make it all possible. So sign up today and get in line for your Expensify card and $1000 of zero-surcharge purchases. Your card will be in your mailbox before you know it, and your dread of expense reporting will soon be a distant memory!
Thanks again to Jason Calacanis, Michael Arrington, and the entire TechCrunch 50 crew for putting together a fantastic venue and the best launching pad that anybody could ask for. These guys did a fantastic job, under difficult circumstances, and I can't wait to see what they cook up next year. With any luck, Expensify will be there!
- David Barrett, Founder, Expensify
Well, the word is out: Expensify is live and taking orders for our one-click expense report service. I'll have more to say in a bit, but for the moment I'll let Travis Kalanick (our advisor) do the talking:
"Expensify is launching at TC50!
Who here has a bag of stale receipts sitting in their closet? Receipts that long, long ago should have made it into some expense report. . . of course to get there, you would have had to organize that big bag of receipts in chronological order, affixed and taped each of them to a separate blank sheet of paper, gotten some excel sheet or web-form and done a few hours of data entry. Of course, you’d also have to remember what was discussed at that steak dinner in Denver (it was with customers. . .yeah, I’m sure it was), and then list their full names and titles. The list of headaches stretches for miles. . .Taxi receipts not filled out, separating room charges from room service and hotel Internet, old faded receipts that are illegible. .. the list goes on and on.
So I think we all would agree that there is one word that is synonymous with doing expense reports. .. PAIN.
So much pain that it takes up to 45 minutes per $1000 of expense reporting. For employees with expense-prone job descriptions (there are 50 million of you in the US: salespeople, office managers, small-business owners) that comes to 30-40 hours a year. That’s a week’s worth of vacation, or a week more of actual selling to hit your quota.
The pain for many of the less expense-disciplined among us, hits us in our pocket book. Some estimates are that 5% or more of all legitimate expenses never get reimbursed because of receipts that get lost, and expense reports that don’t get filed (referring to that bag of wilting receipts above).
Expensify wants to change that
Expensify’s Company Mission: Empower small-business employees, independent contractors and sole proprietors with easy tools for PAINLESS expense reporting.
Expensify accomplishes this with 3 main Expensify components:
1) Expensify expense card – a card that you use to make expense purchases. You top-up Expensify card with your existing credit card. The card makes expense categorization a breeze, and allows Expensify to automatically fill out expense reports.
2) Receipt capture and upload – take pictures of your receipts and upload with either Expensify’s iPhone application or with simple email attachments from your phone or PDA.
3) Expensify Dashboard – Expensify automatically associates the receipt images with the expense card entries. You’re only a few clicks away from a completed expense report. Submit digital expense reports to your boss or client (via email) or print out and send physical expense report.
So now you’re saying, this is all way too easy. Expense reports done with only a few clicks, submitted before I even get back to the office from a trip. No more lost receipts or expense report hell??!! How much does Expensify cost?
Identical to PayPal pricing on an existing credit card, Expensify charges 3% of transactions made to the Expensify expense card.
How can you justify Expensify cost?? If Expensify saves even one receipt in thirty from getting lost in the shuffle, the extra reimbursements means Expensify pays for itself! We also know that time is money, and the time you save not dealing with expense reports should add to your overall quality of life
And remember, Expensify charges ARE reimbursable expenses!!
So how do I get started?
Step 1 – Register at Expensify.com
- Enter email address and password
- Verification email sent to you
- Sign up for Expensify expense card
Step 2 – Set up iPhone/PDA for receipt image capture
- iPhone users: Install iPhone application for quick uploading of your receipt images
- Other phones/pda’s: Email photos to receipts@expensify.com
Step 3 – Impatiently wait for your Expensify expense card to be mailed to you
- Should be delivered in one week
You’ve now been EXPENSIFY’D!! Enjoy easy no-hassle expense reporting!
Thanks for checking us out. Give Expensify a shot, let us know what you think, and don’t hold back. .. feedback for the product, venting over previous expense report nightmares, just sound off. .. . and thanks for getting EXPENSIFY’D!!
Travis Kalanick
Expensify Advisor and happy customer"
