Since its 2008 founding, San Francisco-based Expensify‘s slogan has been “Expense Reports that Don’t Suck!”
But with the recent release of the company’s RTER (Realtime Expense Reports) feature, users might think a better slogan would be, “Killing your Expense Reports Since 2016!”
The new feature, which as of Jan. 11 has become the default configuration for Expensify’s signature app, not only allows users to use their smartphones to photograph receipts, but automatically categorizes and (in the case of businesses) attaches them to transactions.
The values are then automatically added to a user’s digital expense report, which can be configured for daily, weekly, or monthly submission. If everything matches, the appropriate funds are automatically exchanged and the report is automatically exported to the user’s accounting program of choice, such as NetSuite or QuickBooks. If anything doesn’t, the user is notified, and the program highlights the exact expenses that need to be reviewed.
“Basically, we think we’ve finally killed the expense report,” Expensify founder and CEO David Barrett told ITBusiness.ca. “Just take a picture of your receipt, and we take care of the scanning, reconciliation, categorization, auditing, exporting, and final reimbursement.”
Barrett wrote about the changes in more detail in a Jan. 11 blog post, emphasizing that for the majority of users, the process will simply become more automated, and that current Expensify users can immediately use the new features at no additional cost.
“This means Expensify is now a truly ‘one click expense report’ experience, where every SmartScan kicks off a large chain of automated events to make your life easy,” Barrett wrote. “Obviously, you can still dial back the automation to maintain the old, ‘classic’ flow where you and your employees do everything by hand. But why would you want to?”