Expensify CEO and founder David Barrett recently announced
that the 10-year-old company would not release new features "for a while,"
but that doesn't mean the expense management provider isn't upgrading its
system. Many recent enhancements aim to improve existing features and the user
experience and prepare the company to scale up.
Small & Midsize Business Card Integration
Expensify now can import sub-account card feeds from
American Express Open, the card network's small- and midsize business card
offering. "We can allow company admins to import employee credit cards,
providing the same ease of use and centralized capabilities of commercial card
feeds but for these SMB-focused company cards," Barrett said.
Expensify administrators can see a card's expenses, whether those
expenses are legitimate business expenditures, whether a given expense needs a
receipt and whether any given expense has been submitted.
New Fee Structure
Since 2014, Expensify has charged $9 per user per month and
hasn't used contracts. Now, clients that sign up for at least a one-year
contract will receive that same pricing. Others can opt for the flex billing
plan at $18 per user per month. A free six-week trial still is available to all.
Barrett said the new structure will help Expensify invest adequately
in long-term, committed customers. "The straight $9 with no amount of
commitment meant we were spending a tremendous amount of time bringing on new customers
… but if they don't actually onboard, then they never get active and never pay
us anything," he said.
User Experience
In recent years, Expensify has implemented machine learning
to automate many of its expense processes. The platform creates expense reports
for travelers, automates expense approval for managers and automates reimbursement
for accounts payable. But Barrett admitted that all clients aren't comfortable
enabling all the automation. "A very large fraction of businesses use a
subset of that functionality … so the less automation you enable, the more of a
manual process it is. The big improvement we've made in the past two months was
to really improve the manual expense reporting. … If you want to do it by hand,
we're going to give you the best possible experience to do it by hand."
Improving that user experience included streamlining both the
Web platform and the mobile app. For example, Expensify rewrote code to make it
easier for users to pick and choose expenses to drag into an expense report and
to search for expenses more quickly.
The company also took steps to optimize the code for each
the Android and iOS apps so page refreshes and data loading are "snappy
and fast," he said. "Everything is much more consistent with the
website and just better overall."
Similarly, Expensify expects to finish upgrading its data
center hardware this year. The upgrades will ensure that Expensify can continue
to processes expense quickly as the company grows.