Expensify - Travel & Expense Reviews

by S3745

I got an email from your company today that both appalled me and mad me really angry. I don’t know why corporations feel they should take a stand on politics. We don’t use you for your politics. Why can’t you keep your opinions and lies to yourself. The email sent today was the most unbelievable lies I have every seen. I am an independent and what you sent out made me sick. I watched all year long while BLM burned down cities, police and people were killed in cities across this country. I also watched people vandalize the capital building. Both were wrong and neither were peaceful!!! I don’t want your opinion or lies shoved in my face. Please keep your personal political opinions to yourself!! I will suggest to some rather large companies that I know the owners to never use this app. You just alienated half of this country with your lies!! Trust me, I am not the only one angry over your ridiculous email!!

by 50 Pence

I’m currently in the process of reporting this company to the Attorney General of my state, Federal Trade Commission and Better Business Bureau for unethical practices. The software is a little complex and unintuitive, but once you figure out the basics it works well. They’ve changed how they bill so now I’ve been billed for 6 people for the past 3 years when I’ve had a max of two. When you contact them they won’t refund even though they confirm that only two people max have used the software for these years. I deleted the users but the reworked the system so you are still billed for them unless you change the software in a secondary setting. Like I said unintuitive. I’m an honest hardworking business that has had to borrow money to stay afloat for the past two years. This business just went public and makes 100 million a year and charged me over $2,000 for no service delivered and won’t do anything about it. Either be extremely on top of them monthly or find another more ethical business to support your company as they will gladly rip you off when they can and do nothing about it

by BattleRed

Not only do they provide an expense app that we canceled because we found a more stable & end user friendly option but David will email you at 2am telling you “I know you don’t want to hear this from me. And I guarantee I don’t want to say it.” After he settles that interesting internal conflict with himself, he’ll tell you how to make better personal decisions. Awesome right? David feels his opinion is valuable to you & wants to give you even more than you paid for. He teaches you what he thinks is important & that you should too, he’ll enlighten your life with how it should be & he criticizes his customers to ensure they make better decisions for their families. So if you need an expense app AND a personal life coach David is your guy. If you’re comfortable with your life & you just need an expense app well as we again found there are MUCH more stable software. We chose another app and Wayne Dyer books. Good luck & I hope you can learn to be the right customer for David, not disappoint him with your decisions and overall meet his expectations for your life. Wait... who is David again?

by Kdole

I have a small business and had hoped this app would help with organizing and tracking staff expenses and such...but the set up and process didn’t provide the benefits I’d expected for my particular needs. I tried it out for several weeks (after the initial trial), realized it wasn’t for me, but then got busy with other work, and waited several months to find the log in info and cancel the account. It promptly warned me that I was on a very confusing annual plan, and that they would have to bill me for a higher rate for the months I’ve been using the program. Though I hadn’t been “using” the program, I suppose I didn’t meet the qualifications of an inactive user(?), and that I would have to pay a canceled subscription charge amounting to about 6 months of fees I’d already been paying for 8 months.

While I am not normally affected by irritations such as this, it seemed incredibly deceptive, even after reading through the pricing structure again afterwards, and has prompted me to write this review, hoping it might encourage others to understand it thoroughly before committing to an this app program. It might have been cheaper to keep the program for the extra months and cancel later, but by that time I was too huffy to consider it, and just wanted out. Too bad. I might have revisited it another time, but certainly not now.

by Sodaude

I used to love this app and used them for many years. This past year I noticed my fees were going higher and higher and I don’t need the service for my current job so I contacted them to put it on hold. They tell me the prices are going up and will increase 100 percent (from 5 to 10 $ per month). And then when I ask how to pause the service until I need it they say I can’t. They claim I was given notice. It was one sarcastic email that said “if you’re bored in quarantine go read our updated terms”. Nothing warning you about massive price hikes or limited time to opt out. I haven’t used the service in over a year. I think it’s shady to take the price up in 40 percent increments each month. It seems they want to make you gloss over this in your cc statement. I asked for the phone number and their isn’t one. Just some chat bot. I hate when companies do this! So shady. I wouldn’t use them again. Price gouging customers in a pandemic and hoping they don’t notice is just a new low.

by Trebloc1290

A few years ago, I decided to improve my record keeping. this app was the mode I chose. After buying Expensify , I never really got started, and that’s not the fault of this app. So, the monthly credit card charge just kept rolling while Expensify sat unused in my phone. Today, I decided to cancel. I couldn’t find a cancel option on Expensify . I wrote concierge and got an immediate response asking how to help and keep me in the fold. I again asked for instructions on canceling. Concierge went cold. After multiple messages from me and 7+ hours time, I got the SAME “no answer” response. Then, finally, instructions that DID NOT work! I then called the phone number given for this app on my credit card statement. Guess what? The answering machine mail box is FULL! So, I’d advise those looking for an app of this type to look elsewhere. I’d hate to have a pressing need with Expensify- you can’t get a response without much effort, and then all you get Is the runaround.

by Warri0rG0ddess

this app is literally the worst. I am forced to use it to submit my expenses at work or I would never touch it again. If you are in charge of making the decision of what to use in your workplace to submit expenses... this is not a good solution. The interface is unforgivably unintuitive. Accounts will just stop being synced with this system with no warning. When you spend hours checking boxes to create a report - it will just clear them and you will have to start over. When you try to use the chat for help - they are NEVER there. They just revamped the interface and somehow it is WORSE than before but with different fonts. I don’t understand how such a clunky hard-to-use product is so widely utilized. I work in tech and have a degree in economics (I’m not generally challenged with financials or with tech) and I have literally had to submit a support ticket for EVERY expense report I have ever submitted. Please fire your UI team, do some user testing and make your product easy to use ....PLEASE!!!

by Steve The Grat

I got a long email from the founder/CEO (It was a blanket email to all customer) telling me to vote for Joe Biden and if I don’t vote for Joe Biden it will be the end of democracy as we know it (hard not to role my eyes. Ha.) I disagreed with most of what he said, but that’s okay. One of the main reasons America is the best country in the history of the world is because we all have the right to voice our opinions however we see fit. Apparently, the CEO of this app feels the need to express his first amendment right by repeating what he heard on CNN to his customers. That’s his right and I think it’s a great thing. As a customer, I also have the right to cancel my subscription if I get annoying political emails when all I really want to do is create my weekly expense report. I appreciate all opinions, and it’s not really a huge deal, but I think there is a time and place for politics. My company email account yesterday is not the time or place. Just my opinion.

by VFD Guy

1. when traveling in a personal car for work this software offers you the option to have it track your miles. This is very nice except that it pulls on the processor so hard that your phone heats up like an oven. I can play video game on my phone and it doesn’t even get hot. In fact even when the phone is plugged into the car charger it still decreases in battery while running this option.

2. The second complaint is the stupid political stuff that randomly shows up when using their service. I find it unethical to charge us for a service that you use to push your political messages. Even if I agreed with the message, it’s still not ethical and you should never be seen on any “professional” service. Some people might even find this problematic as it may need to be reported as a donation to the party as advertising.

by KimberlyBe

I like this app but have grown so frustrated with Expensify or website not having a simple search by amount function. When you have hundreds of receipts it is impossible to find a receipt easily. Sure you can search by vendor but when entering receipts what happens if you Mis-spell the vendor or what if you enter credit card transactions from a statement that uses a different vendor name. That happens all the time making it impossible to easily search for a receipt.
In looking at the forums people have complained over and over about this basis function being missing and in three years this app has still not added it.
It is mind boggling why such a basic search function is missing.....
I therefore can only give Expensify 2 stars due to the wasted hours of searching screen after screen for receipts.

by Kahleelee

Love the camera feature. It makes adding receipts a lot easier than on the web/desktop version. But Expensify crashes, freezes and it’s difficult signing in via Expensify & website. Expensify has scared me a couple of times after signing in and it say “make your first report” when I had been working on one for days.

Also it’s frustrating that the homepage doesn’t have a easy to find login screen. It’s always tryna sign me up again or freezes on the signup screen even though it says I’m logged in. I often find myself using both my phone and computer at the same time to process expenses and add receipt. It would be nice if Expensify had all the same features like mileage but it crashes so often that I do t try to push it. As long as the image uploads, I can edit it on my computer. I only used this app for work and I’m pretty tech savvy. I can only imagine how it is for people who aren’t. :/

by Yellowkiwi

I started using this Expensify several years ago at the recommendation of a client. I like the fact that I can go paperless and get rid of all the paper receipts however being that I’m a self-employed person and some of my receipts don’t have the title of the store or restaurant or wherever (ex. New York City taxi) scanning gets a little bit more confusing and I have to manually type that in additionally and the system doesn’t recognize the manually entered receipt with automated same receipt once it’s posted to my account. 2)expense reports this past year have not been updating the correct total. I can see the amounts I entered for each receipt and the total does not reflect those. 3) another real BIG problem is that there is no phone number to speak to a customer service person which is extremely frustrating and very needed because it takes up to three days to have an issue resolved. For example- I have my own s Corp however paying to send expense reports to myself makes no sense. I tried undoing this but then I was unable to access past folders. Customer service via email did a poor job of explaining and didn’t refund me. Also Expensify often loses marked categories when I manually enter in. I’m not sure why that is. The categories show up on the computer but not on app. I do hope this can be fixed.

by Noneofyourbusiness777

Smart scan used to be a huge time saver - quick and accurate. Lately it takes up to a day to scan and errors are pretty common. I used to be able to take a picture of a receipt and just forget about it, but now I have to check them all and fix far too often.

The developer response is condescending. I have used Expensify for several years. For most of that time it steadily improved. Smart scan removed all of the cognitive load and made it fire and forget. That is no longer true. Errors have become common and scan time is 24 hours or so. That means I have to think about it now. I always scan at point of purchase. Instead of the lame “you’re holding it wrong” excuse they need to fix this. Obviously they are having scaling problems. I guess that means business is great, so good for them. It won’t stay great if they don’t get back to making the product get better with time instead of worst.

by #icountbeans

I have been using this app for several years. It’s a great product with exceptional customer service. They are very responsive on their chat feature. I can ask them anything and they will respond almost immediately. The only two negatives are that I’ve come across a couple limitations with the depth of functionality. It’s limited. Also the owner is very “political”. It’s very inappropriate to bring your personal views to a business platform. If it wasn’t such a pain to move software, I would have at my last job because of that. Other than that, it’s very user friendly and a nice product for the price point.

by PaulR1999fr

I’m a sole practitioner with a lot of small travel expenses. this app gets rid of the paper and data entry hassle completely. I love that.

I would like to see 2 improvements.
1. The ability to add a handful of custom expense categories in addition to “other”.
2. Smartscan always puts an expense in the report that is first in the list. However I have multiple reports open in parallel and this means the expense is almost always put in the wrong report and I have to change 50 entries to get them in the proper report. This is a recent change to this app that I hate. A year or two ago the expenses were auto-filed in the report that was most recently active which was better.

by Kippy Andernutz

I’m a career management consultant - travel weekly, sometimes to different clients over the course of a week. Most but not all of my expenses are billable. And I am one of the owners of the firm, so I’m involved in submitting expenses for reimbursement, approving others’s expenses for reimbursement, invoicing, bookkeeping - the whole process. We started using this app a year ago, moving away from the receipt + tape method to 100 percent digital scanning. While we don’t use this app for invoicing (super buggy to re-bill expenses through this app), it nonetheless has streamlined our entire process, improved accuracy, and saved considerable time and frustration for everyone. Highly recommend!

by A Fan From SF

I downloaded Expensify to submit my dining out receipts to insurance. We had a recent flood in our kitchen and unable to do our usual cooking while we wait on contractors. The receipts were piling up (over 100 so far) and task seemed daunting as far as submitting them all to a Mercury Insurance. I thought of xeroxing all of them and mailing them off to my adjuster but my printer is low on ink and then I decided to search for a receipt scanner app. this app was the best overall rated app and I am happy to say it blew my mind in that not only did it read receipts that had low ink and were a bit crumpled but it sorted them by date automatically making it so easy and get through the huge pile. I will check back when I find out if it was easy for my adjuster to open and receive the report.

thankful from happy receipt scanner!

by Rvjustiniano

this app was great until this a few updates ago when concierge option to disable auto summit was set submit daily as default on my profile. Normally this would not be a problem as I would log in to my laptop to retract a report so I can put all my receipts in one report.

Well today I wanted to work on my expenses and guess what, you can’t retract a report that was closed. No worries because Puffin browser has always been there to help me launch the desktop this app site on my smartphone, well at least that was in the past. Today it won’t allow me to navigate the desktop version and instead wants me to launch Expensify .

Seriously? Can you guys make life more complicated for an app that is supposed to make life easier? this app I’m about ready to dump you like yesterday’s newspaper.

by Alpsheses

As I write this, it has been my second week interning for the company I chose to work with to fill my major and minor requirements for college. I tend to travel much more this semester which has led to more inconvenient gas expenses. However, due to the fact, the company I am interning for has chosen to work with this app, I have much less to worry about in regards to my travel costs. The active chat employees are always accommodating with making sure you are reimbursed for expenses as soon as possible and strive to create a positive experience whenever you require their assistance. I’m not one to usually write reviews but, when I find the right brand I just tend to say how I genuinely feel about it. Take that as you will but I hope that most companies tend to consider integrating Expensify for employees due to the hassle it alleviates. Either way, I recommend you give it a try if you get the chance.

by Zens7s

I started using this app to track my solo expenses for tax purposes. It’s such an easy to use product that I have been able to toss out all the paper based work that took up a large amount of time every month.

At some point, I was switched to a lower priced plan that was a better fit for any person who is just tracking and not submitting for reimbursement. I had mistakenly applied a group policy setting and was actually paying twice for Expensify . The Customer Service person/“Consierge” was extremely helpful in fixing the situation. It was resolved easily and without any added stress.

So any app that works well, saves me time, and has great customer support when needed is a thumbs up in my book!

by Balanyo

After investing a few days to set everything up, I now regret it - but I am stuck as I don’t want to retrain everyone in the company for the next disappointing service..

Despite advertising response within 24 hours, they replied to me more than a week after asking about an issue and after the monthly expense posting deadline.

The entire service is a bit confusing, but ok I can live with that, just need a little more time investment I thought.

However their automated categorization of expenses, which is supposed to work like a charm to save time as opposed to create new issues, is beyond useless. They don’t even recognize Uber or Github receipts submitted probably by millions of people by default, even if we just forward the machine readable email receipts.

But ok I thought, let’s then set up expense rules manually... Well, that doesn’t work either :) At least not for everyone in the company “policy”. I can’t set it up centrally so that it posts neatly expenses to QBO. No.. Every employee would need to set this up for themselves, coordinating with with each other, or I can sit down 48 times to do it for everyone, every time there is a new expense category :)

It’s beyond me how this service got 5 stars.

by Marpa10

this app’s performance has fallen dramatically, it used to be stellar at reading receipts, even hard ones as I believe they had humans to back up if the machine can’t spot the correct information, unfortunately I have gone from 95% receipts read and entered to about 50% or less, I have ALOT of receipts and Expensify has completely dropped the ball for me as of lately. It also used to take a matter of MINUTES to scan and now takes up to a day? That’s ridiculous there is a great number of people who do all their expensing in one place and don’t have 24 hours to wait for a bunch of failed responses. They are now lazy, don’t even offer retrying and simply have you do it yourself. Unfortunate as it was once fantastic and well worth the money, now I am spending far more time and effort to get them done then what’s worth it.

by Michael2014ishere

I love it how they enable the automatic report submission for me, then there is no option to disable it in the mobile app, and when trying to access their website from my phone the only available option after logging in is to go back to the mobile app. Indeed, I shouldn’t presume to know anything about what i want to do with my reports.

And of course why should a company in the 21st century provide a phone number for people to contact for support? The important decision-makers have the right phone numbers, and the regular users should just get on with the program. We are simply not important enough for the company to waste valuable resources on.

It is good to be reminded of our place in the grand scheme of things.

by Deadsticks

I really enjoyed the this app application and it appears to have most everything I am looking for with some exceptions.

My biggest issue and I would most likely not buy this program again unless I fix would be put in place and that is the complete lack of life support.

If you run into any issue and you need their support there is no telephone number and there is no live chat options unlike every other APP I use.

Unfortunately when you submit an issue and you are in need of help from their team they tell you they may get back to you in 24 hours or more. In reality, you ask a detailed question and 24 hours later they come back to you with a generic answer that does not fix a thing. Repeat this multiple times and you are stuck without being able to run your business or pay your employees it is terrible!

If they fixed this to a live or better format to be able to respond to your needs when their program is not working correctly I would give it five stars however given the above I give them 1 to 3 stars.

by Geemonroe

I was able to use Expensify after the latest revision for a whole of one expense, and now it does nothing but crash. On the latest iOS it does that weird thing where you can see the screen image while sliding between different apps that are open, but once selected it crashes and or blanks out and returns you to your phone’s home screen. Cannot comment about the latest updates changes within Expensify due to it now being completely unusable.

**********UPDATE ************
Problem fixed, love the improvements. Only 4 stars due to annoying header notifications every time and expense or report is created or updated.... these just get in the way and stall you work flow.

by EFBruns

I’ve taken perfectly clear pictures of very well printed receipts and have had smartscan going for hours without success. I’ve asked for help and just got back a firm response saying to keep doing what I’ve already been doing. I don’t have hours to input even one receipt more or less several.

After two scripted responses from the developer, that really weren’t any help, I discovered that the best way to handle a receipt is to take a picture of the receipt and immediately save it. After awhile you’ll get a notification that the receipt was scanned and whether it was accepted or if there was a violation that needs to be dealt with. This discovery raises my score from a 1 star to a 4 star rating.

by Mousey2232

So far so good!! The last couple of years I have struggled to manage keeping my receipts together. This year was no different. October 15th was my deadline to file taxes and I stressed the entire weekend trying to find receipts. Effective yesterday I made a commitment to using more effective tools and as I looked for something to help me manage expenses this app came highly rated. Actually it was the number one. So far so good. I have uploaded two receipts and categorized them already. I am only using the free version right now but I’m almost certain I will be paying the fee to continue its use.