A brand new look for a brand new year!

Sheena Trepanier

What better way to usher in the new year? How about a dazzling new look offering a host of great features you can find in your Expensify account.

With our sleek new design, streamlined UI, and fun options for personalizing your account, it’s easier than ever to manage your expenses. The cherry on top of this sundae is the under-the-hood improvements which result in lightning fast search and expense filtering.

So, what’s new?

• Navigate from one central menu on the left side of the page.
• See your expenses and receipts all in one place – the Receipts page has been folded into the Expenses page!
• Customize the view on your Expenses page to focus on what you care about most! With views focusing on expense details, receipt images, or analytics there is sure to be an option for you.
• Search for specific expenses by merchant, or use Advanced Search to refine your results by report status, policy, tag, or category.
• Make your account a little more personal with your name and photo.

Stephanie from the Success Coach team will guide you through what’s new:

https://expensify.wistia.com/medias/ne8yqrreys

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Happy New Year and cheers to a great 2018!

Julia

Was there an update somewhere that I missed announcing this change?
I'm excited and optimistic, but I really wish I had a heads up so that I could have communicated this to the employees in my organization accordingly. (And carved out some more time during year end to learn the new changes because I am training 50 new users next week. Unfortunately I won't have time to update the training materials I already spent several hours putting together ).

BrianP

Can I please get my expense advanced search and filter back on the left pane? It's horrible now that it scrolls out the top of page and is not fixed/pinned!!!!! This just switched for me 15 minutes ago, all other features are great. When editing hundreds of expenses you use Merchant search and other advanced features 50 times more then you toggle between Inbox/Expenses/Reports. Who did the UX/UI review on this????? They must have done it with a small report of just a few expenses.

You now have to scroll back to the top of the page to do any of the following;
1. Advance from page one to page 2, 3, 4 of long expense lists
2. Search for any merchant
3. Change policy filter, card, or category

Theses things are manipulated 100 times an hour when doing large reports and you never one move between "Inbox" or "Expenses", "Admin" or "Reports". Those items are now pinned and fixed to the left bar and it's a complete waste of space on seldom used menu items!!!

Please help- the change of filter location is pretty bad for our productivity and is absolutely killing our year end processing. Thanks- Brian

RHaydon

Is there a way to hide expenses/receipts that have already been approved?

NEVERMIND - found it under advanced search.

Sheena Trepanier

Hi @Julia - A few weeks ago we released a limited beta of the new pages to admins we knew were interested in testing new features and designs. If you'd be interested in being included in any future betas, let me know!

As always, thank you for the thoughts and your willingness to share them with us. We are very excited for this release and have worked hard to provide resources for you and your employees so that this change isn't as jarring.

We've updated our Help Center for the new design, and created a great doc for training in new employees with the changes in mind. You can find that documentation here.

As you're exploring the new changes, we'll be here to answer any questions you have or listen to any feedback you'd like to share. I'm happy to hear you're optimistic and I think you're going to love the new feel and look.

Sheena Trepanier

@BrianP - Thanks for the feedback on the pinned filters at the top of the page. I'm going to bring this up with my team right away and if we make any changes I'll be sure to update you on this thread.

@RHaydon - Glad you found it!

LisaNia

I second the request to move the filter back to the left - the real estate for the search already exists, so might as well put it there, plus, this is how I looked to see both reports and expenses that were out of date/etc/

BrianP

@Sheena, thanks for checking it out. I'm probably not using all the correct nomenclature in my post above, but all comments were in reference to the "Expenses" section of the platform. It would be awesome to flip it back, or add one additional layout button which could change what is pinned to the left- give us a choice. Advanced Expenses Search, or the Main menu items. It's a lot of screen real estate to pin those main menus over there, i hardly ever toggle between them compared to the editing process of 500+ expenses at a time with advanced filters to remove duplicates, add receipts, weed out items, etc. I spend 80% of my app time in Expenses and need to see the tools relevant to the edits at all times when in the section! Every other change i have seen has been intuitive, thoughtful, and increases productivity, but disappearing search options, page advance, and merchant filter in Expenses is no bueno! (for how i use the platform)

David_H

Feedback on the new UI.

• The main issue that jumps out at me is the UX people are trying to get clever, and columns such as TAG and COMMENT only show up if an item has a tag or comment. This type of UI design causes great confusion and also IMO reflects an incorrect assumption that if those fields don't contain data it means they don't need to be visible. As an admin I want them visible precisely BECAUSE they should contain data, and if the column is empty it's an instant visual cue they need to be addressed.
• When I opened on my laptop it was even worse, even though it's a high res laptop evidently the app is now coded not to display certain data on certain size screens or resolutions? I couldn't even get the CATEGORY column to appear.
• I tried to enter a dummy expense which I added a tag and comment to so those columns would stay visible, but even that workaround fails the moment I filter to any card that I had not tagged expenses on yet. So I guess that means every time i close a report and don't have any new expenses tagged or commented on, those columns will keep disappearing? That's crazy UI design :-) and I hope you fix it or give us an option to have those columns always visible.
• I agree with Brian's comments on having to scroll all the way to the top.

Other than that issue, I don't have any particularly strong feelings about the new UI. I prefer the old one and found it more efficient but that could probably be solved with a few improvements to the new one as noted above.

Thanks for listening.

Sheena Trepanier

@BrianP - You're welcome for the attention to your post, it's valuable information for us to receive and we appreciate it.

@David_H - Wonderful feedback as well, this is really great to receive. I'm helping my team keep track of suggestions, feedback, and general sentiment for the changes, and will take this opportunity to bring up what you've shared.

I'll keep any other updates in this thread, thanks again!

David_H

Thanks Sheena! A little more feedback now that I have used it more:

• I believe there should be some type of visual cue to make it clear to the user that clicking on "open" is referring to an "open expense" and that clicking on it is going to open a report. The natural assumption for many users will be that "open" is a command, and the user will click on it to open the expense to look at it. That is what I did at first, and then got confused that I had somehow jumped to a Report screen.

Another thing I noticed us that at times under advanced search a drop down for tags shows up. But it's very buggy and confusing to users because again, it appears to dynamically show up only when the view has some tags. BUT...often even if the view has some tags it often doesn't show up, and the only way to get it to show up is to refresh the screen.

I can understand the tags drop down not showing up if a company policy had tags turned off, but if they are on, then the tags drop down should always be there, just as the column should always be there (or gives us a simple way to decide what columns we want visible).

Thanks

David_H

One thing I absolutely love is that there are now drop downs that allows me as the admin to select other submitters and also cards of other submitters. If that was possible before I was not able to do it. All our cards are company cards, so looking at other users expenses or a specific card whether submitted or unsubmitted does not violate anyone's privacy and will better allow me to see expenses as they are rolling in.

Sheena Trepanier

Hello @ChrisK - Thanks for joining our discussion about the new changes. Can you tell us a little more about your workflow and why combining the two pages disrupts your process? We'd love to understand more about the effects the changes have on your normal use of Expensify.

Lesley

As an admin I co-pilot into the accounts of all of our credit card holders to mke sure all the expenses that were imported from their corporate cards have been reported. This used to be easier from the expense tab because if the expenses were all reported, there would be nothing there. Now I have to scroll a lot to look at the statuses - Open, Processing, Unreported etc. Basically, I don't want anythign that was imported to be Unreported. If it was manually entered it's less important but I might merge for them or delete if it was a duplicate. I'd like to be able to filter by the various statuses and by imported vs manually entered. Does this functionality exist? Can it soon please? Also, where did the contact us / help thing on the bottom right go?

Sheena Trepanier

Morning @David_H, thanks for following back up on this discussion!

The Open status on the expense being confused as the open button for the expense details is a new one, but I'm glad you brought it up because it's not something I considered before. I'm definitely going to keep my eyes open for other mentions of this, thanks again.

The tag dropdown under Advanced Filters though, that I want to look into more right away. I'm going to do some recreating in my test environment and bring what I find to my team. If I'm unable to recreate it, I'll reach out to you via email and hopefully we can get some evidence of it from your account. Either way I'll be in touch about this.

I'm glad you're liking the dropdowns for cards and other users! It sure helps with analyzing spend and reconcile when you can drive down deeper into a single card and isolate those expenses. Have a great day!

theresaw

I would love to be a fan of this update, but I can't think of a worse time to dump something like this on your customers, with absolutely no warning or training. Most of us are trying to close, not just the month, but the year. No matter how much better these changes might be once we're used to them, it's an unnecessary distraction at the busiest time of year.

ICW

I really want the Receipts page to come back - it's how I'm used to going through receipts to put them in various reports. It helps me understand what I've uploaded/scanned/emailed, or not. The smartscanners don't always get everything right and the automatic appending to certain reports based on date ranges doesn't work for me either.
Maybe I'll figure it out, but really don't understand why you had to completely change the usage paradigm here. Can you add an option to go back to the old view?

Also the Advanced Search is bringing up very old expenses that I previously deleted (often due to duplicates). Now I need to manually go through old reports to see if I missed them or if the "unreported" ghosts are just ghosts that I can't get to be deleted.

tpayton05

I want the receipts page page! Not having his makes it harder to complete the reports and much more time consuming! Making this change at year end is a horrible customer experience!

KathyEM

This launch is a failure. No warning, bad timing.

kleonpilobolusorg

Overall, I've always disliked the App and been glad it's not a neccessity to use often in my particular position. But now, sadly, all that I dislike about the app is now here on my desktop. Extremely disappointed.

Julia

@theresaw I couldn't agree with you more.

I am trying to be optimistic and patient, but this is literally the absolute worst timing ever with month end and year end closing.

Now that I've had a chance to sit on this for a little bit, I don't even think a 'heads up' would be nice. It should be the bare minimum expectation that major changes like this are communicated with as much notice to admins and domain holders as possible.

I understand the training materials have been updated in the Help Center, but because of many different factors, we had to create a more customized training for our users so that they can use Expensify the way we are intending.

For example:
*embedded tags
*Mostly corporate credit card users
*all tags, comments, category, and receipts required over $30
*we encourage manual submit instead of scheduled submit so that our corp CC users can review receipts they smart scanned that didn't merge with the CC charge from the feed on the back end

I'm sure I'm missing some, but for this reason, the out of the box resources in the help center tend to just confuse our users since they aren't customized.

I have 50 new employees to train on this system next week, and no time to immerse myself in the new changes or to update any of the training materials I've already spent hours putting together.

Sorry to sound so crabby, but Expensify, I just gotta say it again. A heads up on major changes is just the decent thing to do. I shouldn't have to find out about it at the same time as my employees during the busiest and most stressful time of the year in accounting. I shouldn't be up at night worrying about how I'm going to manage this unexpected change during year end. I shouldn't have to work this weekend to try and pull together new training materials so that my new employees are set up for success.

DannyD

It would be great if there were a way to search the Comment field, in addition to the Category and Tag fields.

bspoke

I just starting using the new look today and everything is taking forever, page loads are visibly delayed (taking between 1-2 seconds to load anything).

LauraL

Hate the new layout - I spend most of my time in Expenses, and if you are using a laptop you can now only see a few of them if you have ANY of the filters used - put them back on the entirely unused left hand box! Miserable. Also as someone said, everything I hate about the App is now on the desktop. The desktop was basically just fine and infinitely preferable to the app which I only ever used to take pictures of receipts. Now not even any receipts page! What a staggeringly horrible rollout. Waste of real-estate on the left hand side, horrible space taken up on top bar, no ability to tab through, everything going really slowly. Awful.
I am pleased about the split allocation fix for QBO, but that isn't something I use more than once or twice a quarter. The layout is something I am impacted by nearly daily.

Lizhong

I share mostly similar sentiments regarding the timing of rollout and UI/UX. Our users have also been complaining about experiencing a lot of slowdowns.

I do enjoy the additional features on the expense tab. Before I had primarily spent my time in Reports as it was a much clearer layout. I think one suggestion I have is to allow us to see an enlarged image of receipts in the first two view options. The third option is simply too much as I only want to focus on the receipts of interest.

Phase4

I agree with other users that this is a bad timing for a new layout, yes New Year but we're still dealing with end year expenses. I used to be able to select multiple expenses and add them to a report. Where is that option now? I stared at my screen for a long time trying to figure out how to do it. No luck, so now I have to individually add them. The pages take a long time to load. Adding a receipt on the individual expense module sometimes won't attached. Before a huge UI/UX update, there should be a Beta for all users, not just the ones you think are interested in trying the new features. It would be nice to have an option to jump back to the old UI/UX and slowly integrate your users before a full on switch.

zyliu

This UI is very slow. Bad design.

jerryr

I would also like to express frustration with how Expensify has handled the rollout of these new features. Without warning or explanation, the Receipts tab first disappeared. You didn't even bother to use your "Product Changes" alert feature to notify us of the removal of the Receipts tab and explain the new intended workflow. I, along with others, assumed it was a bug and contacted support. And now there's a major UI overhaul that arrived without warning.

On top of this, the site's performance continues to be quite poor--I experience delays on almost every other click. And when I'm not experiencing delays, I'm running into bugs. For example, after the UI overhaul, the name on my account mysteriously changed to a name that belongs to no one in our organization. And we're now getting the option to process reimbursements on reports that have no reimbursable expenses. Instead of playing with the UI, I'd really urge you to focus on your software quality first. Then, create a workflow to notify all users of major product changes and give everyone the option of "opting-in" to try out radically new UIs before forcing all of your users to upgrade to them (almost every enterprise-oriented app I've used does this--including TriNet, which is not exactly a bastion of usability and innovation). You're no longer a scrappy little startup; if you expect to serve enterprise customers, you need to provide better stability and predictability.

Dharrier

Agree with Brian. Need the advanced options back. This sorting is needed for end of year processing and comparison reports

shift_ken

Anyone running into the issue where changing categories on this new platform is extremely slow? It's taking me almost 1 minute to change a category on an expense report.

Sheena Trepanier

Hello @Lesley, welcome to the discussion and happy to help! If you open the Advanced Search tool on the Expenses page, you should be able to filter the visible expenses by status (ex: Open, Processing, Approved) and limit the expenses you have to look at. You can even filter between imported and manually created!

Also in Advanced Search is a drop down for card or cash expenses.

I hope that helps!