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Comment by oq | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad you asked. It's really just an entirely different approach. We’re not building another expense tracker (no offense - some people just need to track expenses). We believe the core of the problem is not in the tracking of expenses, but rather the back office workflow. We’re trying to solve a team collaboration problem.

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.)

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This sounds awesome.

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.

Thanks! Firstly, glad you're no longer having to suffer through that, haha. It's a great point you bring up - we're trying stay focused on serving businesses with 5-100 employees where that's less of an issue.

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.

It is the small businesses that get screwed the most. Big companies have guys like me. It is only a problem when the IRS decides to do an audit, and they determine the 50% rule applies on the last 5 years of M&E. It is a non-issue for small businesses right up to the point when it becomes a major issue.

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.

> payouts are tied to approval and go out nightly

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.

Totally felt that pain! And honestly, your companies don't want to delay the payout - it's just a hassle for them to do with existing services. That's why we baked it directly into the approval process, so they don't need to even think about it - it'll just show up in your (employee's) bank account and sync with the company's accounting solution in the background.

Brilliant, Omar. I usually end up putting together a massive expense report after procrastinating for months. This makes way more sense.

Yea, we encourage people to submit expenses more-or-less as they happen (takes 10 seconds!) then throw away the receipt and be done with it. People can still submit expenses in batches if they want to, but there's a lot to be said for doing it while you're thinking of it / before you lose that receipt...

How do you compare to big players in the market like Concur, which has these features?

In all seriousness though, which features were you referring to that Concur has?

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