Expensify makes doing expense reports easier

Foreign.

So who are you?

So I'm David with Expensify and we do expension reports that don't suck.

And we're here in the Sandhill Starbucks. Which is why it's a little noisy in here.

Exactly, exactly. But you know, this is the place to be for any entrepreneur.

So yeah, the Red Beacon team was just over here doing their, their adventure pitch, which is fun.

Everyone makes the rounds through here at some point.

So what is Expensify for? Why do you need it?

Well, we're for anybody who submits expense reports and hates them, which is an awful lot of people. And the way we make them not suck is by importing your expenses and your receipts right after your credit cards and mobile phones, submitting expense reports through email, and then reimbursing everything online using QuickBooks and direct deposit. And so the idea is just to make it. I mean, because every purchase you make anymore is electronic and then oftentimes it gets converted into a paper receipt and you get to type it into an Excel spreadsheet and it's printed out and then it's typed into QuickBooks again. We just try to keep it electronic, end to end, such that it implicitly takes away the fraud, makes it fast and easy just for everyone involved.

So can I get started on this if I work for a big company or is it only for small businesses? I work for Rackspace and they have a whole expense.

Sure, sure. I mean, we have users up and down the chain. Actually we have companies big and small. But I see a real sweet spot is like the 20 to 100 person company. We have plenty of customers in the 100 to 1000 range as well, and of course a lot in the sole proprietor as well. So it's up and down the chain. I think anybody over 1,000 employees probably isn't really suitable for us, but anybody under 1000 can definitely use us. Yeah.

So how do we get started? We're here at Starbucks, we buy lunch or a latte and we want to expense that.

What do we have to do? So there's a few different things. So first, if you. Let's say that you have an iPhone. This is application. You can do everything on the iPhone. Actually, it's a new app we just launched last Tuesday which lets you create an account, import your credit card, take pictures of receipts, create full expense report, do the whole thing on the iPhone, just click submit and submit it to your manager. One thing that's a little unusual about Expensify from the start is the first person we talk to isn't your boss. We talk directly to you. So if you just submit expense reports and hate them, submit them through expensify and see what your boss has to say. And by and large your boss will say thanks. This is awesome. Because nobody's really loyal to Excel and email. No one really likes it. Your bookkeeper doesn't like it, your boss doesn't like it, and you certainly don't. So if you just submit through us, it just makes it easier for everyone.

Can I take a picture of the receipt?

Sure you can, of course. And so if you make a purchase with cash, you just use your. We have native applications for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Palm Pre. Just take a picture of the receipt, it'll upload straight to our servers. Or if you import, you just make a purchase with a credit card and import your credit card into expensify. And we support 95% of US credit cards. We can actually give you an IRS ready paper receipt equivalent in terms of electronic form straight off your credit card. And that works for any expense that's under $75. That doesn't deal with hotels based upon IRS regulations, but that's about four out of five paper receipts you pick up at a business trip you can literally throw away entirely. And we can satisfy the IRS requirements right off your credit card. Very cool.

What if I'm traveling overseas and I don't have a roaming data plan or.

That's fine. Yeah.

Like I was just over in Israel and I only had 50 megabytes and I used 50 megabytes. It's starting expensive.

That's bad. Yeah. So the iPhone application works offline, you can take pictures as well as log expenses offline and it'll synchronize next time you're online. Also, we support 58 international currencies and we maintain a conversion table such that we will convert the transaction to whatever currency you want in the historical market close rate of that day. So certainly we've got tons of international users and yeah, I agree, you have to have things that work offline as well.

How do you guys make money?

So it costs $5 per submitter per month with the first two free. Now submitters never pay, but we look at them sort of as our evangelists, our lead generators, if you will. And so to create an expense report is always free to submit, it is always free. You can receive expense reports from up to two people per month completely for free. But when that third expense report comes to you, or rather an expense report from the third person comes Then we'll prompt you to enter a credit card and it costs $5 per submitted per month, basically with the first two free.

What's the challenges of your business? You're out of the gate. You've gotten a lot of buzz on Twitter and stuff like that.

What are you working on? Well, I mean we've got, I'd say that right now. So we've got three. Well, so we've got three major roles in any expense reporting. There's the submitter, the approver and the bookkeeper. What's sort of interesting is they use the exact same data, but they have entirely disjoint requirements. And so we've had very good functionality for submitters, integration and now I think going forward more for managers and sort of central administration things. But overall we feel very good about the product. It's really turned a corner. I think it works for a lot of people and it's gotten to the.

Point where technology, damn technology, these cameras if can't keep up with the writing rate to the card.

Got it, got it.

So it seems like it's going down. So the, the challenge, I'm sorry, repeat the last minute. The challenge was.

So the challenge is. So there's three distinct roles for expense reporting. There's the submitter, the approver and the bookkeeper. And though they use the exact same data between all three, they have entirely disjoint requirements. And so we've long had very strong support for submitters. We've added very, very good support for bookkeepers through QuickBooks, Immigration and Direct deposit reimbursement and things like this. And now going forward, I think we need to give a lot more love to the managers, to the approvers themselves who allow them to manage their organizations in a central manner and just really get good visibility into their spend and controlling spend.

Can I see what it looks like?

Sure, I'd be happy to. So to use Expensify, you just go to expensify.com, type in your email address, choose a password and click sign up. So there's no big profile to fill out or anything. You just sort of jump right into it. And as I mentioned before, you don't need any permission from your boss, you don't need to wait for anybody. You just sort of create an extension for it and submit your boss and see what they say. And I think overall this bottom up adoption curve has been a major benefit for our growth overall because we can grow naturally and virally pretty much without any ad spend whatsoever just by doing it. Very quickly, this, your first question as a new user is what credit card do you want to Import? We support 95% of U.S. credit cards. Choose your bank from the list, enter your username and password that you use at times, the bank account.

Now, what if I, if I've been lazy for the last three or four months and I have a stack of receipts?

Oh yeah.

Does this help me chew at that stack a little bit? Because that's probably what will get somebody really motivated to try.

Well, we can import, when you import your credit card, we'll import generally three or six months of transactions in the past. And so we can get you started about the past quarter, quarter overall, depending upon your bank. And then certainly the goal is once you get started is to chew through that big pile that everyone has. And so we can definitely take a crack on that from the very start. So anyway, we've imported a credit card and so as I mentioned, we've imported your transactions, but we also import your receipts. Now this is what I was talking about earlier, the expensify guaranteed E receipts. And it debates upon our electronic import. We can get most certain information that appears in the paper receipt. But more importantly, they can get all the information the IRS requires to document the expense for the remaining transactions. We find that most of those purchases are done online. Airfare, hotels, car rentals, things like this. Take the email receipts that you were sent from the booking website, Forward it to ReceiptSexPensify.com we'll convert it to a full color PDF and archive it permanently. For the few straggler paper seats that remain, take a picture with your iPhone, Android, BlackBerry or Palm Pre. It'll upload straight to our servers and you can attach it to the corresponding expense. And so for all transactions, whether they're cash transactions, you know, credit card, you can always capture the receipt in a digital form and throw the paper away. And so I think one of the biggest benefits is you just don't have that wallet stuffed full of receipts at the end of the trip because everything's always taken care of for you. That's really cool. Yeah. And then of course you can create expense reports. Pick and choose. We have expense policies such that your accountant can set them up or you can set them up and we'll submit everything online. You can submit it to your boss for reimbursements and we can export to QuickBooks. And essentially the QuickBooks export has been a pretty interesting thing. One thing we found, the QuickBooks integration is interesting because QuickBooks can be configured and misconfigured a million different ways. And so we've had a very comprehensive integration that allows you to, no matter how you configure QuickBooks, we can export appropriately to take care of all the information for you. And then you just click print. A check comes out that you hand to your employee, or if you don't want to click print. We actually are an integrated payment engine ourselves. We can withdraw the funds directly from your account deposit into your employees checking account entirely through Expensify. It's pretty much an end to end electronic expense reporting system for the masses. Very cool.

Well, thanks for showing this to me. We find out more@expensify.com that's right.

And we'll see you at Finovate next Tuesday. Very cool. Thank you very much. Thank you. Sam.