FAQ: Can I turn off Concierge?

Rachael Hopkins
Rachael Hopkins Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 904 Expensify Team
edited February 2021 in Getting Started

For the Expensify Success team, this is a very common question, so let's tackle it here...

To answer this question, it helps to know what Concierge is. Concierge is your virtual Expensify assistant - any automation or helpful messages in Expensify are from ‘Concierge’. This means it’s not as simple as ‘turning off’ Concierge. So let’s look at what is covered by Concierge and what you can change:

Messages - when you first use the mobile app, Concierge will confirm that you’re on the right track ‘thanks for scanning your receipt’. Concierge will also tell you if any automated actions have taken place e.g. expenses deleted due to Duplicate Detection. These messages cannot be turned off.

Very occasionally, we may also let you know about changes in the way Concierge works via a Concierge message; this can't be turned off either

Mobile notifications - when you have violations, or your report is approved or reimbursed, Concierge will notify you via the mobile app. You can control these notifications in your phone’s notification settings.

Duplicate Detection - if you SmartScan two expenses with the exact same date and amount we’ll delete one because 99% of the time it’s in error. But if you actually have two the same, just go to your Expenses page and use the Deleted filter, then open and ‘Undelete’ it.

Emails - when you have reports to fix or to review, Concierge will email you weekly to let you know you need to do something. These can't be disabled as many of the tasks are crucial to you and your team.

Technical emails - If you are the technical contact for your accounting integration, and the sync fails, you will be emailed about it. The technical contact is set on Settings > Policies > Group > [Policy Name] > Connections and the notification cannot be disabled (it’s crucial!)
Inbox - anything you can do or need to do will be listed on a card in your Inbox in Expensify. This cannot be turned off, but you can ignore certain cards.

Report Creation - if you use Scheduled Submit, Concierge is listed as the user who created the report and adds the expenses to the report. Scheduled Submit is generally controlled on the Policy.

Guided Review - When Concierge tells you to review a report, only the expenses with violations will be shown for review. If you want to look at everything, close (x) out of the yellow Guided Review banner.

Automatic Approvals - if you set your Manual Approvals to ‘No’, any reports without violations will be automatically approved by Concierge. You can set this to ‘Yes’ to make everything manual under Settings > Policies > Group > [Policy Name] > People

Automatic Reimbursement - if you set your Manual Reimbursement Threshold on Settings > Policies > Group > [Policy Name] > Reimbursement, anything under the set amount will be reimbursed by Concierge, and if it’s under $100 it will be next-day reimbursement.

AutoSync - When AutoSync is enabled on your accounting integration, Final Approval on a report will automatically trigger the export to your accounting software.

Now you see all the stuff that can be automated from the first SmartScan to exporting to your accounting system, you may not want to ‘turn off Concierge’ at all, but hey we won’t blame you if you want to disable your phone’s notifications! (you should probably pay attention to emails about reports though!)