Expense reports are a pain in the ass, which is why David Barrett founded Expensify in May 2008. Since then, the startup has raised nearly $7 million in funding and added a number of features, like receipt automation, to its platform that allows users to collect and automatically categorize your transaction records. Users register their credit cards with Expensify, and they import eReceipts, tag expenses, and send a copy of your expenses over to your company’s bookkeeper.
Today, the service made some further announcements about the progress it’s made in taking the suck out of your expense reports. For starters, Barrett says that over 90,000 organizations and 650,000 individuals are now using the service. These organizations using Expensify run the gamut, including names like Evernote, Square and Tumblr.
Besides the company’s 10 percent month-on-month baseline growth, the Founder says, the platform has seen a sizable rise in signups thanks to its Evernote integration and its becoming an Android “Staff Pick”.
While Barrett says that its “bottom up” sales model (where users sign up for a freemium product that results in a premium upsell for their company), they’ve found that the sale requires more advanced functionality and working directly with customers. As a result, Expensify is launching a salesforce focused on companies between 100 and 1,000 employees, with a number of features for employee administration and accounting integration.
But the salesforce won’t be cold calling anybody, it only works with current freemium customers, he says, to help them “get over the hump”.
To support this mission and for overall streamlining, Expensify is splitting its “one size fits all” pricing into a few basic plans: “Personal” for those using Expensify for personal finance, “Professional” for contractors and freelancers, “Team” for small companies under 100 employees, and “Corporate” for midsize companies over 100 employees.
There are also two major changes inherent to the new plans, one of which is that every account now gets a monthly quota of 10 free receipt scans, with the option to buy more. The second major change is the introduction of domain-based admin features that allow users to “claim” their domain and get administrative control over any account with an email address ending in their domain name, as well as an advanced “GL code” integration with external accounting packages.
Though Expensify is not yet profitable, Barrett says that the company has been able to build “meaninful revenue” with steady growth and will likely not need to raise more than the $6.7 million it raised in 2009 and 2010.
The CEO said that he thinks that the company has “stubled into an incredible combination of freemium economics and viral growth in a market with thick enterprise margins”. If customers respond to the new pricing plan and salesforce with the same gusto they’ve shown for its features to date, the future may very well be bright for this San Francisco startup.
For more on the new Expensify, see the company’s blog post on the announcement here.