Expensify continues to add more features to its financial management application. Best known for providing a leading expense tool. It has now launched a budgeting tool to help admins manage corporate spending.
Daniel Vidal, Chief Strategy Officer at Expensify, said, “We’ve been working closely with our accounting partners and steering committee to ensure our product continues to solve more and more of their problems, and this was one of the most frequently requested features in recent conversations. As companies tighten their purse strings to prepare for the new year, we hope to be able to provide all of our customers with tools that ensure smooth sailing, no matter how bright or stormy the economy might feel at any given time.”
This is not, however a fully features accounting solution, nor does it appear to integrate closely with other accounting solutions. This first iteration of the platform does not appear to enable a direct synchronisation with accounting solutions. Nor does it support the import via CSV of budgets, categories or tags.
What is the budgeting solution?
Admins can create budgets for monthly and yearly spend at various levels. These levels include employee, team, department or corporate-wide settings. A budget can be added to each category. The admin can also set a percentage against which they will be notified when a budget spending level is reached.
Users will be notified when the budget notification threshold is hit and again when 100% of the budget is hit. Once hit, a notification message is sent in the admins room of the Workspace.
The tool does not stop people from spending. But it does mean that users will be more aware of what they have spent in different categories. So it may slow down their spending. For example, if a user has a budget threshold set to 50% on stationery and after only a week they get a threshold notification message, they know that they will have to slow down spending for the rest of the month to make sure they do not exceed spending.
The important aspect of this new feature is that it will deliver the notification far faster than the finance team reviewing spend at the end of the month. The response is as the expense is being made. The users are also able to view how much budget remains for each category or tag for the remainder of the period, giving an almost instant insight into their spending and helping to avoid overspending.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Expensify continues to expand its product. While this latest new addition is not a fully features spend management platform. Once set up, it does deliver some value. Hopefully, in future iterations, Expensify will enable integrations from accounting solutions and automatically populate some of the data on the expenses platform around budgets.
If they are able to draw down budgets against each category and then automatically allocate those budgets across teams and individuals, enabling admins to adjust where appropriate, this could become a powerful tool. Without the ability to import data from a CSV, it feels like there is a management overhead to this new feature that might make it time-consuming to set up.
