Include the ability to turn off notifications/and or features for the New Expensify Card

bgo_555

My company was originally considering the Expensify Card option but ended up not pursuing a rollout of this feature. However, since we were already preapproved, my firm's employees now receive routine notifications about registering which causes a mini-revolt / chaos amongst employees and causes confusion about our firm's messaging. Is there any way to shut this feature down or at least limit these pesky emails?

Jason Li

Hi @bgo_555 - at the moment, once a domain is approved for the Expensify Card, there's no way to "cancel" your application or prevent these automated emails from being sent. I'm very sorry for any trouble caused here!

I definitely appreciate you bringing this to our attention, and will pass on some feedback to our team. In the meantime, is it possible for your employees to set filters to prevent receiving these emails? 

domenicaduran

I am having the same chaotic reaction in my company - can we please get these emails to stop? Please - my reputation hangs on the balance of a smooth transition into Expensify! 

Rachael Hopkins

Hi @domenicaduran Welcome to the Expensify Community!

The Expensify card is a feature of Expensify, you can set the card limits to $0 to prevent them being sent, and we'll capture user info proactively.

Is there a reason you prefer not to use them? If you are just in the initial stages of Expensify setup, it's probably a good time to get them set up. It means employees will never need to be out of pocket!

Julia

We never requested to be approved for the expensify card, nor did we authorize a pre approval. My users are being inundated with the same annoying messages, which is wreaking havoc in my department. 
Please make them stop! 

bgo_555

In addition to previous poster's comments, I'm also surprised by the inability to turn off email notifications or certain features given Expensify operates in the enterprise software space and many of these functions should be coded for the bare minimum customization.

david_wheat

Agree with the posts above.  I see a blind spot on Enterprise companies that manage Expensify on our users' behalf, not a free-for-all where we want employees picking and choosing which Expensify features they think are neat.  

Victoria O'Leary

Thanks for the feedback @Julia @bgo_555 @david_wheat 

You are right, we have made some pretty big changes here, so let's have a discussion about it! 

First of all, Domain Admins are always in complete control of the Expensify Card -- we will never send a card to any employee without the Admin explicitly assigning an unapproved expense limit to the employee.

The approach we are taking is designed to be as proactive as possible, capturing user provisioning information upfront, even before they are assigned a limit. We have this design because we've learned that obtaining user provisioning often slows the process down when it comes to provisioning new cards to employees. The approach we've taken means, when and if you do decide to roll out the Expensify Card to your employees, most the boring administrative work is already taken care of for you, and you can get on with more important things!

At the end of the day, the Expensify Card is just one more platform to keep expense management simple. Just like the Expensify App is visible for all employees to see, so is the Expensify Card, but the admin always have total control over exactly what employees can do with the card, including not giving a card at all.

It's great to get your thoughts on this though, so let's keep this discussion going!

mwprevette

I agree with the posts above - we have not requested to be approved for the Expensify Card and I'm getting calls from employees because they're getting notifications to sign up for a card.  I understand that they cannot sign up if the admin hasn't approved, but there is still wasted time since they're having to call me to ask about it.  There needs to be a way to stop this.

cparsons

I agree too, there seems to be a lot going to all employees, these emails should be targeted at admin for the larger companies using Expensify, so that they can have conversations with the necessary colleagues if needs be.

Vinny

This is one of the dumbest marketing things I've ever seen. As the admin for my company (and also the marketing lead) I've now got to deal with confused people. Thanks for making extra work for me. And I thought the whole idea of expensify was to reduce our workload.

bgo_555

@Victoria O'Leary I totally get the admin rights and it's great to have those capabilities but I think what most customers want is the ability prevent spam from occurring and to configure the system without the system foisting its latest feature upon users (esp one as financially sensitive as this). The admin controls are lipstick on a pig. Great product but it has noticeable enterprise flaws.

mclark83

Let's stop the marketing messages and emails about the Expensify card ASAP. My employees are so confused and it's taking up a ton of my team's time to explain.

nliso

We have displayed 0 interest in the Expenisfy card. Our employees not only have a VERY misleading "To-Do" in their inbox, they are also getting detailed marketing e-mails. This needs to be removed ASAP. It's taking tons of my teams time to field this and quite frankly we look ridiculous for not being able to remove something we are not supporting.  

jenrobertsonINV

Same here - we do not want our users receiving these Marketing comms, it's not their choice to sign up for the Expensify card - it's ours.

mstichter

Agreed with all comments from customers. Admins should be able to control messaging to employees; this is causing confusion. Add in a two page marketing email from the CEO sent to all employees that we didn't authorize... 

Scott_G1

Agree with all comments from customers.  Total waste of my time and frustrating our user base.  We have not even enabled this in our policy yet your message to our employees imply that they will be getting a card.  Your marketing tactics have completely turned us off to ever getting the card.  Make it stop!!!!

KatieScoular

Completely in agreement with all comments above. The "to-do" in the inbox is incredibly misleading to our employees and my team is fielding a lot of questions. This makes our team very unprofessional and unprepared since we didn't know this was going to be broadcast to our employees and we can't control it. Our employees should not be your target audience for these marketing messages, it should be the admins.

lapland

I agree completely with all the comments listed above as well.  We should be able to have control over messaging to employees and is causing confusion!  Please make it STOP! 

GenieS

We did not sign up for the Expensify card.  I have employees emailing & calling me.  Compliance was asked if the notices were a spamware attack!  C-Suite executive is asking if we need to replace Expensify with another service.  Please, please tell me how to disable the direct marketing to our employees.

April Bekkala

Hi there - You can opt to hide the Inbox task for the Expensify Card - just click "Hide" under the task!
For some additional context, the Expensify Card is not a separate product that can be removed. It is a feature of Expensify. Think of it as a function like Scheduled Submit, you can either make use of it or chose not to.

If you are not interested in the Expensify Card, you can hide the task as explained above.

nliso

@April Bekkala
 This doesn't make sense to have confusing messages.. If it's a feature of Expensify we should be able to turn it off if we aren't interested and thus the marketing & todo's behind it go away.. Clearly many of your customers are not happy about this. 

GenieS

The hide the task or not --- as Admins we can deal with any marketing / options direct to us.  The problem is the tasks & marketing directed towards our employees.

mstichter

@April Bekkala see GenieS response. We shouldn't have to ask 1,300 employees to turn off a "to-do" in their inbox. 

IStisser

Hey @nliso, @GenieS and @mstichter, I appreciate your feedback and I will share your insight with my product team.

As we mentioned before, users will need to hide these tasks in their Inbox if they don't want to sign up for the Expensify card. This feature is part of the Expensify product and cannot be disabled.

Thanks!

April Bekkala

I understand. Our intention certainly wasn't to make your life more difficult, actually quite the opposite. We wanted to make it easy for employees to request this feature be enabled and for you to know which employees had requested it. The nature of the program is such that you have full control over who gets shipped a card and once they have a card the design of the Unapproved Expense Limit is you have total control over exactly how much exposure you have on a per-employee basis: once over that limit, the card turns off until you approve the purchase. In any case, it sounds like our attempts to make things easier for you haven't had their intended effect. I'll be sure to pass your feedback along!

JBrannon

@IStisser , @April Bekkala @Jason Li , @DavidBEx , @davidb I really hope that you are listening to your customers. This was a poor decision made by your management and marketing team. Like the other individuals/companies, we too have not signed up for the card and have NO INTEREST in doing so. It is bad enough this is listed as a 'To do' item in our employees inbox, but to send them emails to their company email address is going to far. If you must send out information on your products only do so to the Admins, not the entire group of users in Expensify. I too have wasted so much time addressing this issue with our team. I wrote support immediately to stop the emails or opt out of them. I do not appreciate being told that they would send my feedback along and do nothing more. It is time to act if you are getting this much negative feedback. They are NOT a feature of Expensify, otherwise it would not work without it. So you are incorrect @April Bekkala and stop trying to sell it as such. What ever happened to the customer is always right? If we took the same stance you are in not listening to our customers, we would all be out of work. Time to start listening and acting on behalf of your customers, or you may not have any soon.

Corinne Ofstad

I appreciate you taking the time to talk this through with us and I'm very sorry to hear that you feel this way. If that's the case, I want to clarify --we don't have the ability to disable this right now, but I want to make sure your voice is heard by the product team. I'm eager to help you in any way that I can, so if there's anything else I can help with related to Expensify, please do let me know!

Sam_Kumar

I completely agree with @JBrannon and their assessment of this issue. I understand that this might be a company-wide initiative to drive user adoption and indirectly apply pressure to decision makers to sign up for this new service. This is the kind of marketing that annoys and alienates customers. @Corinne Ofstad I strongly suggest speaking to your product team and making this Opt-In only at the domain level. 

Julia

@Sam_Kumar agreed 100%

"I understand that this might be a company-wide initiative to drive user adoption and indirectly apply pressure to decision makers to sign up for this new service. This is the kind of marketing that annoys and alienates customers."

This is exactly what Expensify is doing, you totally hit the nail on the head.

Expensify-
It's really in poor taste to market your products the way you have been. You used to be a trusted and respected SAAS that our employees enjoyed. Now you're the butt of jokes for all your 'shameless self promotion'. If we were using a lite or free version of your product, I could maybe justify the ads. But we spend over 40k with you all annually. 

I appreciate your positive attitude in trying to spin this to be something to make our lives easier as admins. Although, based on the many interactions within this community where your admins/users have repeatedly asked for the same things and features to no avail, I really don't think you're out to make our lives easier at all. I think you're out to drive your revenues. I can respect that. Many of us are from the business/for profit world. Just don't spin your actions and intentions as one thing when we can all see through it quite clearly. It's kind of insulting to our intelligence. 

Julia

@david barrett please take note of your customers feedback. 

I really hope you all can fix this. I have other projects lined up for 2020 that do not include finding a new Expense software, but that may need to change. I am already getting a tremendous amount of feedback from our executives and leadership voicing their displeasure with how things are being handled with this latest ploy.