Trick and Tips

Expensify does expense reports that dont suck by importing expenses and receipts from your credit cards and mobile phones, submitting expense reports through email, and reimbursing online with QuickBooks and direct deposit.

The Foundation: Single Sign-On

We were really excited when Google approached us to be a launch partner for their new Google Apps Marketplace because tons of our customers use Google Apps -- including us! We have long wanted to put an Expenses link up there next to Mail and Documents, and now we had our chance.

To do that, we installed the JanRain PHP OpenID library with the Google Apps Discovery extension. We’d already implemented Gmail OpenID and ironed out the kinks related to having multiple logins to a single account, so implementing this was a very straightforward process.

Lessons Learned

We quickly learned that while single sign-on is awesome, there was a high drop-off rate among admins installing Expensify into their domain. Digging deeper we determined it was due to the setup process being split: part of the setup was done from within Google Apps, but the final part had to be completed by signing in to our site. Not only that, a major part of the setup process was laboriously entering their employee’s emails. We decided to address each in turn by creating a setup wizard and importing the domain’s email list. We approached this change in two major ways:

First, when the Google Apps admin installs the Expensify application, we created a custom configuration step that creates what we call an expense policy. This governs everything from who is part of the company, who can approve expenses, and ultimately who exports to QuickBooks to keep the general ledger in check. Previously this step had to be done after the application was already installed, usually when the admin first signed in. By making this step part of the install process, the entire setup felt much more intuitive and resulted in a higher completion rate.

Second, we used the Zend framework to connect to the Google Apps Provisioning API to fill the new expense policy with a list of all existing employees. This saved a ton of typing and resulted in a vast reduction in the time it took to deploy Expensify to the full company. With everything else in place, the code we used to do this looked something like this:

$oauthOptions = array(
     requestScheme => Zend_Oauth::REQUEST_SCHEME_HEADER,
     version => 1.0,
     signatureMethod => HMAC-SHA1,
     consumerKey => $CONSUMER_KEY,
     consumerSecret => $CONSUMER_SECRET
 );
 $consumer = new Zend_Oauth_Consumer($oauthOptions);
 $token = new Zend_Oauth_Token_Access();
 $httpClient = $token->getHttpClient($oauthOptions);
 $service = new Zend_Gdata_Gapps($httpClient, $domain );
 $users = $service->retrieveAllUsers();

All of the users’ names and emails are presented in a table of employees that the person installing the app can use to set roles and quickly build an approval tree for all expenses.


Once the setup is completed, we automatically create accounts for all of the selected employees and send out a brief email with tips to get started.

Results: 3.5x more users sign up

Overall it was a fast and painless process, has increased the flow of high-quality leads, and has accelerated their rate of converting into real users. Domain admins now sign up 3.5x more users right away than they have been using the previous two-part setup! Feel free to install our app to see how the setup process works, and respond to this post with questions about your implementation -- well try to help out as best we can. And of course if youre still doing your expense reports the old sucky way, please come visit our website (Expensify.com) and wed be happy to help ease your pain. Thanks for reading, let me know if theres anything I can help clarify!

Posted by Zhenya Grinshteyn, Expensify

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