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App Awareness Month – Expensify

BetterCloud Monitor

April 16, 2012

3 minute read

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This post is part of App Awareness, our month-long series where we spotlight a different Google Apps Marketplace application every day in April. Everyone’s favorite holiday – Tax Day – is this week, so we’re focusing on applications that make reporting and accounting easier. The applications we chose to highlight demonstrate excellent integration with Google Apps, and we either use and love the product or know a lot of other people who do. Have a favorite Marketplace app of your own? Tweet it to @bettercloud.

How did people track expenses before Expensify?

expensifyThat’s the question I ask myself every time I use Expensify. The app is so simple and easy to use, and makes a difficult and annoying process so much easier, that I really don’t want to imagine expense reporting and reimbursement without it. Expensify accomplishes this by giving expense reporters easy ways to track and submit their reports, and managers and accounting departments simple workflows for approving reports and reimbursing employees.

Google Apps Integration

Expensify has been in the Google Apps Marketplace for quite a while and is a member of the Cloud Alliance for Google Apps, though the service isn’t limited to Google Apps users exclusively. The product doesn’t have a very deep integration with Google Apps, although it’s hard to imagine what else they might do besides provide Single Sign-On. The product needs data from your credit or debit cards, and usually some type of receipt to go with that. But I’m curious – are there any readers out there that can offer up an interesting Google Apps integration for Expensify?

Expensify actually integrates with a much more relevant software, and that’s Quickbooks. Being able to pull data from Expensify into Quickbooks without reformatting or any type of manual interaction saves our accounting department a significant amount of time every month.

Why We Like It

Expensify gives you a number of different ways to upload receipts to the system. You can forward email confirmations, upload photos of receipts, use their new Google Chrome extension (so you don’t have to deal with screenshots), or even verify your card with Expensify and get eReceipts for most purchases under $75.

For receipts that are uploaded, Expensify automatically scans the image or email and determines what the expense amount should be. You can then link to a charge on your card for an extra level of verification, add to your report, and submit! It’s that easy.

And for managers and accountants, passing around reports to get everyone’s approval is easier than ever. Expensify’s integration with Quickbooks then makes reimbursement a simple task.

You can install Expensify through Google Apps Marketplace or at expensify.com. The setup is very easy, and everyone in your organization who deals with expenses will love you for it.

About App Awareness Month

App Awareness MonthAt BetterCloud, we’ve seen first hand the impact Google Apps can have on a business: extreme cost cutting, streamlined management processes, enhanced collaboration and mobility and much more.

During our time as an independent software provider focused 100% on the Google Apps platform, we’ve interacted with thousands of organizations using Google Apps and we’ve discovered one common trend: knowledge and awareness of third-party applications that extend and enhance Google Apps is extremely limited.

This April, we’re devoting the BetterCloud blog to educating Google Apps users on the wide array of applications available for Google Apps today. These products not only enhance native Google Apps functionalities, but bring a diverse range of services from CRM, to expense management, process and systems management and more to your Google Apps environment. More importantly, adding these applications to Google Apps allows you to retire expensive legacy software licenses and creates a more cohesive organization.

Disclaimer: The companies appearing in this month-long series have not been contacted nor consulted regarding their inclusion. Our choices are based solely on reader suggestions and our experiences with the applications.