Expensify vs. QuickBooks Online

Expensify has been incredibly useful to me for many years. Considering I am using the free version, it's hard to find a better value! If your company does not have a good expense-capturing system, Expensify will save you hours on submitting reports. You can take a picture and toss the paper receipts right at the point of sale without worrying about losing them during your travels. If you have a small business, you can use it to track and organize regular expenses to make billable expenses and end-of-year taxes a whole lot easier.

It seems Intuit is more interested in generating revenue than taking care of their customers. After only 28 (working) days using it, I've had to call for Help 23 times, and, in my experience, only spoken to 2 people who had an understanding of basic accounting practices and the ramifications of some of their suggested fixes on the General Ledger.

Incentivized

• Submitting expenses. It's easy to enter an expense, choose a category, enter the dollar amount and submit it. That's about it.
• Uploading receipts. You can send receipts to Expensify from your phone, or upload them from your computer.
• Entering hours worked. It's simple to move from expenses over to timesheets to submit the hours that you've worked.

Incentivized

• It enables me to do a P&L for each specific program as requested by the county for the grant money that they give us.
• It enables me to do [an] organizational budget as well as a budget for each specific program
• It enables the accountant and the auditor access at any time for transparency

Incentivized

• Make it easier to submit multiple receipts/files in one expense
• Often times I get a warning that the value of a receipt doesn't match what I manually I inputted. So making Smart scanner a little smarter, essentially.
• It would be fun to see stats about my expenses

Incentivized

• The budgets feature leaves a lot be desired - difficult and clunky to populate and maintain.
• Reporting for Budget vs Actual is available but the ability to reforecast based on updated data is not.
• The rules function to default common types of expenses isn't perfect and will get confused if like amounts or a number of similar items present.

Incentivized

We like using the tool and we receive positive feedback from employees and management who use the tool. It saves time and helps us concentrate on the value adding activities so we are very likely to keep using Expensify in the future

Incentivized

It like the product 'right out of the box' and I trust Intuit will continually improve it over the years based on my experience with their desktop products. The large providers of Apps makes customizing the entire package relatively easy and seamless for a wide variety of business types.

Incentivized

Mobile works great, but let's be honest. It's just a photograph. Their OCR and human turk technology works great to scan that photo and enter the proper information. The web interface is decent and allows you to work with single expenses in great detail. What's missing is the ability to mass update expenses, and this sometimes hurts, especially if you're a heavy user of the system.

Incentivized

While QuickBooks Online is generally easy to navigate, there are some features and functions that often require a Google search in order to find out where they are actually hidden. Additionally, there are some simple customization features that are surprisingly not available for an otherwise advanced program (e.g. only having a pool of 4 fonts to choose from, only having 4 very limited templates for invoicing, not color selection, etc). While I would say that about 75% of users shouldn't have a problem finding their way around with basic functions, there is a learning curve if you want to be able to dive into some of the more useful features, almost to the point that you need to have a dedicated account manager in order to use QuickBooks Online most effectively.

Incentivized

We have rarely had outages in the last 10 years. I can only recall 2 times in the last 10 years where we were not able to access our client files.

Incentivized

There are tab issues. When I tab the field doesn't highlight and I have to backspace or delete what is in the field. Happens on the memo field and sometimes other fields. Very time consuming.

Incentivized

Our rep has been amazing. He has built custom reports for us that have been very time consuming and difficult. Our reps are also currently looking into new submission solutions for us that we are excited about. They came up with this and recommended it on their own without me complaining about an issue. They are about our success and are very excited about the product they offer.

Incentivized

Support is great, all incidents been resolved. Quickbooks Online forum is very well organized and helpful. I like the fact that they let the community contribute in resolving issues. Most or many of your answers can be found online. You can also get help on YouTube, but the easiest way to get assistance is through their chat system.

The person in charge of QB needs to be very accurate with record keeping and is recommended to stay on top of tasks. The biggest issue we have is reconciliation, and those issues occur only when too much time has occurred between reconciliations

Incentivized

Concur was a great product as well but Expensify offers the ability to quickly upload expenses and submit reports just the same. There is no free version with Concur, so for a small business that's interested in keeping costs down I would highly recommend Expensify.

Incentivized

I have used Wave Accounting for another business. I selected QuickBooks Online over Wave because of the features available from QuickBooks. Wave is great since it is free, but I feel that paying for QuickBooks Online is worth it for the features. In addition there is such a robust support network and training available for QuickBooks.

Incentivized

As we have grown along our professional path, we have also expanded our use of QB. The scalability is easy and features seem to be waiting for you until you need them. We have increased profits by over 10x from our first year in business to the current and have yet to find a reason to look elsewhere

Incentivized

• Our organization no longer spends countless hours per month orchestrating the consolidation of data (MS Excel, typically) into our general ledger.
• Our accounting department is no longer tasked with making sure the correct individuals have approved submitted reports.
• Our accountants have a much easier time coding the reports that have been submitted by users. For the most part, we rely on users to code their submissions to the correct accounts.

Incentivized

• It has created a lot of cost and in-efficiency whenever we need to talk to support.
• I spent a lot of time setting up their automatic reminders for past due invoices and it worked for a couple of months and then it stopped. It's currently being worked on by their tech team but it has been months and it is still not working. It would have saved me a lot of time.
• Their multi-currency saves time in sending invoices abroad but it's limiting when a customer wants an invoice in USD instead of a foreign currency so I have to set up different customer accounts for different currencies.