Playbooks for every business

Here at Expensify, we think a lot about how a business can start with Expensify and then never grow out of us. It is easy to say, but monumentally hard to do at scale.

This requires a simple enough app so individuals can use it for simple expense tracking. No integrations, no rules, it’s just replacing a manila envelope to store receipts. These people might have yet to form a business. It might just be an idea and the dream of actually starting the business with hopes of paying yourself back or getting a tax break for those expenses.

On the opposite side, it means having an app that can support a Fortune 1000 company that operates in 27 countries. These companies require integrations to every system under the sun and complex routing based on SOX rules no one understands.

As I said, presenting a solution that scales at this magnitude is actually very difficult to do. It does help that even internally, we have both businesses cases I referenced above. We have employees who manage their side hustles and provide us with valuable feedback on how the little businesses can do it. And of course, we support ourselves with highly complex and global accounting requirements as a publicly traded company. Here are some of the ways we do it:

1. We build for the employee first. While the needs of admins, accountants, and decision-makers change drastically between an SMB business and an enterprise business, the role of the employee remains largely the same. They take a photo of a receipt, we input all the information, and the employee is done. They get paid back the next day. This solves the pain point for 99% of employees and they love us for it. They love us so much they are willing to tell their bosses about us. This means the boss doesn’t come to us cold. Someone has endorsed our app and asked them to evaluate using us. This is our bottom-up adoption model, and it works for businesses of all sizes while allowing much of our development to remain consistent for the 99% of our users who don’t change much.

2. We invested in self-service long ago. To serve the very small business (VSB) market, which I’ll call 20 employees and below, you need to have a great tool that also allows for self-service. While we offer every new customer the option to get on the phone with an onboarding specialist, we make it incredibly easy to self-onboard. A surprising amount of people still prefer this route. Likely, because they are not looking for anything too complex and their employees have already endorsed it. Without this option though, many solutions start to feel “too enterprisey” and lose the bottom part of the market. Not everyone wants the full Boiler Room style sales cycle.

3. We have an AI-driven Concierge system to constantly gather information for us. We started building out our AI capabilities a long time ago. People love Concierge because it offers real-time support 24/7 for our customers. But Concierge is also always filtering and escalating information to our team to address. We’re constantly collecting information on what other pain points customers are feeling and discuss solutions in-house. We’re also escalating opportunities to our fully trained onboarding specialists or issues to our highly knowledgeable account managers. This system supports customers at scale, but it also lets us know when we need to help a bit more with each customer, regardless of size.

4. We use playbooks for businesses. While this one is relatively new, it is already incredibly useful. We have worked with our customers and ExpensifyApproved! steering committee to come up with the best practices for how different size companies are set up. These playbooks incorporate industry best practices to instruct clients which features to use. It provides a step-by-step process for every new customer to evaluate if it is the right practice for their company. While not every company uses the exact same setup, providing a guiding light through Playbooks has helped companies grow with us.

5. We assign account managers to almost all of our customers. All customers that have over 10 active users and every customer referred to us by our ExpensifyApproved! Partners get an account manager. Regardless of size, the account managers will get on quarterly business reviews and screen shares to provide insightful suggestions each customer. Scaling this was very difficult, yes, but worth it in the long run. It allows our account managers to help the business grow from a simple SMB with no integrations to a 100-person business moving to NetSuite. We know the fracture points our customers experience as their business grows. So our account managers are there when customers start to feel them so they can help the business grow.

6. We invest heavily in integrations. Serving such a large customer base requires integrating with the best SMB accounting packages, the best mid-market accounting packages, and providing a custom API so we can integrate with enterprise-level ERPs. Additionally, each integration allows the customer to choose how business expenses should be exported from Expensify. For example, different customers require us to export as vendor bills, journal entries, or expense reports as part of the GL, we see it all. On top of that, as you go up the market you need to invest in HR integrations, travel integrations, payroll integrations, and so much more. This takes a lot of time and a lot of desire to support such a large diversity of customers. And we take pride on not relying on third-parties to offer world-class integrations. We build everything in-house. But, it remains one we are committed to because this is a huge value add for both SMB and mid market companies, all the way up to the enterprise.

All of this stuff is easy to write, but incredibly hard to do, especially if you are doing it in retrospect. Thankfully, at Expensify, we’ve had this vision for a long time. We want every business to feel like we’ll make their business a better operation. In the meantime, we’ll always keep improving. But it’s safe to say that we should be proud of the work we’ve done given the breadth of our customer base.

Have any comments, hit me up on New Expensify using this link.