In terms of quantifiable differences, it’s way faster for employees to submit and get reimbursed because we've extrapolated away the need to even create an expense report (submit on the fly), managers can review and approve right from the mobile and for the accountants, everything is on autopilot (accounting autosyncs in the background nightly, payouts are tied to approval and go out nightly, communications go out to employees with payout status immediately, etc.)
That's my biggest complaint with Expensify. Great, my report is approved... now what? There is little indication to me, as an employee, of what happens next or when it will take place.
I used to have the awful job of auditing executive expense reports at a fortune 10 company. One major problem is that employees submit expenses, and managers approve them, but they don't comply with IRS guidelines for deductibility. For instance, an employee just submits a expense for a $300 dinner, and it is approved by his manager.
One area where you could really stand out from the competition is guiding people to do the right thing, e.g. list the number of people that attended the dinner and a few names and titles of the attendees.
That being said, we have built in something we're pretty excited about which is commenting, where managers and employees can communicate right from the phones on specific transactions (kind of like sending a text) to clarify and approve rather than reject and force the employee to start over.
We're also psyched to start building what my co-founder Ted likes to think of as 'data snacks', where we surface relevant insights based on the situation, e.g. you're 80% of the way through your monthly budget, which is really what we've heard companies at that particular stage value most.
For instance, if you have "Dinner, $300", that can be a problem. If you have "Dinner, $3,000, 10 attendees, incl. Larry Page - CEO Google", the IRS will have no problem, even though it is a $300/pp dinner.
Expensify makes the "old school" expense/reimbursement process easier. Expensify lets me collect my receipts, fill out electronic expense reports, submit such reports to my supervisor at the end of each month, wait for his approval, then wait for the finance dept's approval, then wait another 15 days for the deposit. I was a big fan of Expensify because they still made my life easier. But to me, Expensify improves on a pretty awesome dredful process.
Abacus introduces a whole new expense/reimbursement paradigm that focuses on "now". As a user of Abacus, I know if I put in my expense as it happens, I'll get reimbursed right away. This really motivates me to do my expenses now rather than put it off until the end of the month (which also means I'm less likely to lose a receipt).