Changes to report user interface to highlight important information!
Our report UI has served us well for the past decade but it’s time for a clean up. If you haven’t had a chance to see the new report, head to your Reports page now!
Let’s take a look at the changes.
You’ll notice that the report is cleaner as we moved some basic functionality and information to a new Details section, which is collapsed by default. You can expand this by using the Details button at the top right of the report to see the following items:
- Editing expenses - Pencil icon
- Sharing the report - Person icon
- Printing - Printer icon
- PDF export - Download icon
- Deletion - Trash can icon
- Please note you must be the report owner with the report in the Open state to delete it.
- Report ID
- Report type
- Report’s policy
- Report view options (formerly Layout)
- Invoice markup (if applicable)
- Currency Selector (if applicable)
In addition to these UI changes, there’s a few other changes worth noting:
- The Add Expenses button is now located next to the Submit button at the top left of the report.
- Now, you can add supporting documentation as a comment on the report rather than adding documents to a report.
- Receipt thumbnails have been removed from the report view. To view receipts, click each expense on the report or export to a PDF where you’ll see full-page receipts by default.
- Stars on reports are no longer used to indicate reports that need your attention. All reports requiring your attention (be that to submit, approve, reimburse or export) will appear in your Inbox.
- The default order of reports on your Reports page will now be (newest on the top):
- Submitted date if the report has been submitted
- Created date if the report has not been submitted.
If you have any questions, take a look at our help docs, reach out in the Community, or email us at [email protected].
Comments
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Some of these changes are fine, but others cause issues on our end. It has not made things easier for us or cleaner - it has made them more tedious and less presentable. We should be able to hide the notes history when we print a PDF, we should also be able to have the Report ID show up on the PDF without having to change our report description settings. Also, with one of the recent updates, it completely wiped out our default report settings which caused a lot of re-work on our end. While we understand that your company is trying to make things better, you should really reach out to different companies that use your programs to see how the changes will affect them. We might not all be using the system the same way as other users. It seems that our feedback is not ever used. Not a single suggestion we have made has ever actually happened. With all the recent changes, it has really caused undue burden to us, from the continuous pushing of the Expensify card with a penalty for not using it, to all of the UI changes. As users/customers, we should have more control over what we roll out to our teams.
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Thanks for providing these suggestions -- we really appreciate it. I would recommend adding your individual ideas to the Ideas section, so that other users can upvote and discuss. This really does help us gauge interest and gather use-cases for consideration. Feel free to reach out to [email protected] to discuss any of these individual points further, as well.
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Not a big fan of the changes!!
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Matt Moore Expensify Customer, Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team Posts: 132 Expensify TeamHi @WavesBookkeeper,
Could you let us know why? Thanks!
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Hello,
I am not a super fan of these changes neither : in particular the disappearance of the star under REPORTS signaling which reports have not been processed yet. I know that this can be solved by using the INBOX SECTION , however it is always too full of information and it is confusing.
Is there any way the star can be restored?
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i agree on the comment to have the ID shown on the body of ER. Why would you hide it on the details? This is a very important identifier on the ER.
For one thing, we print our ERs to show to our auditors (during audits), now there's no way to show to show that without going through the details or enforcing it on the default ER name (which is not ideal).
Why change something that is not broken?
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Hi @arvinagna – thank you for your feedback. Just to understand your situation a bit better, why is adding the report ID to the report title not ideal?
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to add to these. Expensify won't even let you know that they will make major changes to Customer Facing features like these recent changes in the UI (we can all agree its not the first this happens).
This UI changes (on the Report ID being hidden). is not in any way helpful for us.
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So I am not a fan of the changes because our company relied on the fact when you logged into the website to approve expense reports the reports that needed your attention were at the top with a star. Now it seems like that is not happening and we had several approvers not approving expense reports. How are we suppose to know the reports that need to be approved?
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@TravisW - reports that need your attention are still displayed in your Inbox. You'll want to make sure the Inbox task isn't hidden if you don't see it by clicking "Show Hidden Tasks".
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@Mark Louis - That doesn't work for our account. We have way too many reports to approve and you cannot filter by person that would need to approve.
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@TravisW - thanks for that feedback on the Inbox task. I'll be sure to pass this along to our team so that is taken into consideration.
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I'm going to add my concerns to the changes.
We have users operating under different policies, and not seeing that information on the face of the report means there's a risk of error as it's not easy to see which policy the user is working under.
I also think having the report ID visible on the face was be helpful.
The removal of the thumbnail images of receipts is of concern to us. This was a helpful tool to see if users were using our 'missing receipt' form excessively. Now, we cannot quickly scan to see if this is the case.
It would be helpful if Administrators were made aware of changes before they are implemented and start impacting our users, so we can prepare for questions.
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@Amy_Novak Thank you for your feedback!
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Not being able to hide the Notes section when I print is a huge problem. I send these to customers for travel reimbursement. I don't want customers to see every little adjustment or "back and forth" that I have with the employee submitting the report. I also need the Report ID for audit purposes. Why would you take that off the face of the report. So now you are basically showing info I don't want to see and taking away what was important for me to see.
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we can add the id to the title. while this is a good solution it's not ideal for the reason that we can't enforce or disable editing. The usual convention is users will rename the title into something that makes sense to them and to their approvers. "ex. meals, airfare, uber, etc".
if you are a user or approver raising multiple expense report. Do you think you can easily identify which ER corresponds to what by looking at the ID added to the report?
having the id on a separate field shown on the body of ER is the best way to go.
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@dfricker Thank you for the description of your use case and why it would be helpful to be able to hide the comments section!
@arvinagna Could you share an example of when you'd need to check the report ID? What are you checking against? Reimbursements/exports to accounting systems/other?
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I've already mention it on my first comment. I would assume you either missed my first comment or you are just not taking into account all the comments in here.
Please read through my first comment, you'll see the answer to your question.
Thanks,
Arvin
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Oh, sorry about that! Thanks for your suggestion! This will be shared with the team.
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Our office has quite a few issues with these changes.
1 - Having to click on the details to print, edit, etc. is adding a lot of time to my process. When we are processing hundreds of reports each week, any extra 'clicks' we have to do makes it that much less efficient. You have basically moved the 'shortcuts' further away. That doesn't even make sense to me. (Looking 'clean' is great but not when it creates more work for us. And that's what this did.)
2 - The policy not being visible is very concerning. We have users that use multiple policies. Each policy has different requirements and I have to click 'details' to see which report I am approving now. In addition, when I save the report, the policy is no longer visible. We save each report as a PDF. There is no way for us to know which policy a report is after I have saved it in our files without going back into Expensify to review.
3 - The report ID is helpful to see and we would prefer they be on the printed report. Some users leave the name of their report as "New Report" and they may have 3 different reports in a week. That ID tells us which one we need to review if we are looking in our Accounting Software and need to review a report.
4 - Receipt thumbnails. This is a HUGE problem! We can not rely on Expensify to verify that a legitimate receipt has been attached so I can not approve all receipts that are not flagged. (For example, someone can hand write a note for a $5,000 expense and if it has a date, name, and total, Expensify does not flag it. And in that case, a hand written note is not acceptable.) I would quickly scan the thumbnails to ensure the user had attached either an e-receipt or an original receipt (that meets the IRS requirements). Each week, I personally process about 4,000 expenses. Not having the thumbnails visible is increasing our processing time dramatically. Clicking through 4,000 expenses is a little much.
5 - Inbox / No Stars - I don't like this at all. Maybe I could get use to this but I like being able to go to Reports. I can see how many reports I have assigned to me. The inbox is messy. (We all hate the inbox, it's where you send us junk mail. NO! I do NOT want the Expensify Card!!) It's just not as user friendly. I can't for the life of me figure out why you would want to get rid of the stars? It has no benefit at all.
The other issue I have is you all made significant changes with no notice at all. I sent several messages thinking I was having technical issues (and the person in the chat didn't seem to know what was going on either.) We have a lot of people who approve reports in our company. (I do final approvals). Many of them are sending me emails because "something's wrong with Expensify". It would have been nice to have this information before.
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Cheryl Walsh Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 108 Expensify Team@acctsupport thank you so much for your feedback, it is really helpful to get an understanding of how our customers use our product and featuers. I've raised this with the team for review! Thank you once again.
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Couldn't agree more! Especially re Stars & Report Policy being always visible. This is like the first thing we look at for each report (ex. Billable vs non-billable policy).
I really enjoyed using Expensify in the past, but over the past couple of years it's just gotten worse somehow, starting with them removing proper customer support, no heads up on important updates (great, I gotta re-do our company's Expensify user guide AGAIN), and so many marketing emails.
And yet other things don't get fixed.. like being able to modify exchange rates, remove/inactivate tags when they're deactivated in NetSuite (I have to manually update these in NS and in every policy? so much work!), and combine the domain/policy controls - do we really need both?
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I do normally like improvement, but you can't fix what is not broken. Thanks to those changes we now have to change the way we do things, also called MANUAL. Not sure what's wrong having the report ID visible, and what was done in one click now becomes a nightmare starting to change our internal Manual, policy etc. Good job guys!
I REALLY HOPE YOU REVERT THIS ASAP.
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Cheryl Walsh Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 108 Expensify Team
@jpolanco thank you for your comments, I can assure you our team take feedback seriously and are continuing their assessment of the changes. Thank you!
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We are relying on the id on the printed PDF to identify our users' expenses. So if you remove the id on the generated PDF, this will be a nightmare for our financial working!!!
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Not that it matters, because I agree wholeheartedly with @ExpenseMaster's comments regarding your overall unwillingness to listen to your customers and users, but these changes are no bueno for me too.
The UI was perfect before. Have you all been watching or reading too much Marie Kondo during Covid? You should NOT get rid of things that spark joy. The stars spark joy, because they are a necessity, especially for companies with larger volumes of reports.
The report ID is a necessity, for audit purposes. Otherwise, we have no way to distinguish that the repot being provided ties out to the actual selection pulled for audit.
The policy is a necessity. Even though we mainly have one policy, I can only imagine the heartburn this causes for admins with multiple policies.
In your overall quest for simplicity and UI favorability, you've failed miserably because it was perfect before and you've added additional work for your users.
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Changes = Epic Failure
Customer Service = Sadly Lacking
Solution = Find an new program/product.
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Cortney Ofstad Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 174 Expensify TeamThank you all for responding! I can assure you our team takes the feedback seriously and are continuing to asses the changes. I appreciate you all taking the time to share your feedback on this!
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Awful. Where is the bulk edit. Changes are more click = time wastage.
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Sophie_Pinto Expensify Customer, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 134 Expensify Team@TMF5012 - did you see this help article on how to bulk edit expenses? Is that what you were after?
