A small move that will have a big impact on stressed out corporate types.

I’ve been following Expensify since soon after its inception back in 2008. The company has, since its founding, seldom been out of the news. Hardly a week goes by without Expensify announcing a new partnership, integration or branch office. So how does a company less than a decade old generate so much interest?

Well, that is made easier due to the fact that Expensify is helping to ease what is one of the biggest nightmares that anyone within a large corporate has to deal with – the expense process. For anyone who has never worked within a corporate, it would be easy to think that getting reimbursed for a business expense is a simple process. Alas, nothing could be further from the truth and I have heard many tales of the time that people spend submitting expense claims. Tales where many days are spent at the end of each month simply meeting the requirements of corporate finance.

Yuck.

Expensify is changing all that with its automated receipt and expense management offering. Via a mobile or web app, Expensify automates the entire expense reporting process using receipt character recognition, corporate card management, and integration with pretty much all the major accounting software platforms – from Intuit QuickBooks to Xero, from NetSuite to Oracle, from FinancialForce to Workday. Expensify reports that five million individual users make their expense reporting less hellish using the Expensify platform.

And that will get even easier, at least for those organizations whose employees use ride-sharing service Lyft. The two organizations are announcing an integration today whereby Lyft receipts are automatically uploaded to Expensify reports for tracking and reimbursement.

Instead of having to forward Lyft receipts to Expensify, users will instead see their Lyft rides automatically added to expense reports for receipt tracking and reimbursement. And it seems there is demand for this integration, David Barrett, CEO, and founder of Expensify reports that Lyft receipts are one of the five most commonly expensed items on his platform.

The integration with Lyft is part of Expensify’s ReceiptBurner platform, which aims to eliminate receipts through partnerships with the most commonly expensed merchants. The partnership follows on from previous announcements with Uber, Hotel Tonight, Revel Systems POS, Egencia, trainline, and SaneBox. Barrett reports that within the first two months of launching a ReceiptBurner partnership like Lyft, Expensify sees up to 400% growth in the volume of receipts automatically imported via the associated integration.

MyPOV

A simple integration, but an important one. As someone who has firsthand experience of both traditional expense reporting tools, and more modern ones, I can appreciate that value that ReceiptBurner delivers.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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