With the summer travel season in full swing, expense-management specialist Expensify is busy launching new solutions to make it easier for business travelers to manage expenses. Last week, Expensify unveiled ReceiptBurner, a new integration platform that automatically pulls data from receipts regardless of source. And this week, the company announced a new feature, Price to Beat, that gives companies insight into how an employee’s spending on typical travel items—flights, hotel reservations, and rental cars—compares to the average cost. Employees with below-average spending can be given a portion of the savings via Expensify Rewards.
Expensify CEO David Barrett (founder) says both Price to Beat and Expensify Rewards offer ways to “gamify corporate travel by giving employees a share of their company’s cost savings.” He said the combined features bring transparency to corporate travel and spending, pointing out that beyond expense reports, his company is dedicated to “streamlining business travel so that organizations can spend time focusing on building their teams and products instead of getting bogged down by the hassles of travel logistics.”
Left to right: Expensify Director of Strategy and Marketing Ryan Schaffer and founder/CEO David Barrett demonstrated Expensify Invoices at FinovateSpring 2013 in San Francisco.
Businesses need both Price to Beat and Expensify in order to create the employee reward, which appears as a reimbursable item on the worker’s expense report. The procedure is straightforward; employees or administrators simply forward their travel receipts to receipts@expensify within 24 hours of incurring charges and Expensify automatically calculates any potential savings and processes the reward. Price to Beat is still officially in beta and Expensify made the announcement during the annual Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) convention.
Note that Expensify’s ReceiptBurner has already been launched by partners Uber, Revel Systems, and Fujitsu ScanSnap. The solution automatically creates an expense report when an Uber ride is completed and when a transaction is made with a merchant using a Revel Systems POS system. “Our dream is for receipts to become the next floppy disc,” Barnett said.
Founded in 2008 and headquartered in San Francisco, Expensify demonstrated its Expensify Invoices solution at FinovateSpring 2013. This spring, the company announced that it would power Uber’s new Auto-Expense feature. And in May, Expensify announced that it had forged a strategic partnership with fellow Finovate alum, Xero. The company in 2015 was called one of the hottest startups by Forbes, and named to Fast Company’s Top 10 Most Innovative Company list.