Option to Disable Invoice Feature

sfdamon

We only use Expensify for expense reports. With hundreds of employees across the world in our Expensify account the option to create an Invoice is confusing, can lead to delayed reimbursements and, worst case scenario, a customer invoice created by mistake. Contacting support I was told there is no way to disable invoicing, which creates yet another reason why we're looking for another expense management platform.

Christina Dobryzynski

Hi there, @sfdamon! Thank you for reaching out about this and sharing some insight into how your company is using Expensify.

We have some built in restrictions for users at the domain level, I wonder if maybe adding an option to prohibit users from creating an invoice at the Domain Group level would be helpful.

Here's a support article with the current restrictions that can be set at the domain level, can you take a peek and let me know if this something along these lines could be an alternative option apart from disabling invoices. Thanks!

sfdamon

Hi @Christina Dobryzynski. Thanks for the response. Unfortunately the Domain Group options don't currently offer any restrictions related to Expensify's invoice feature.

Christina Dobryzynski

Thanks for the follow up @sfdamon! Sorry, my last response wasn't super clear.

You're correct, we don't have any built-in restrictions for invoices in our product.

I was brainstorming another possible solution to your proposal of disabling invoices - I wanted to see if you thought the idea of adding domain level invoice restrictions would help your company. Let me know what you think!

sfdamon

@Christina Dobryzynski: Domain level restrictions for invoices would be better than nothing, though Domain restrictions can be problematic if you don't have all users on the same domain. I would prefer that this be handled at my Expensify account level. Many software platforms would treat this type of functionality as a module which could be enabled/disabled for our entire account.

Cortney Ofstad

Hi @sfdamon!

Thanks for responding and providing additional context! I've passed this feedback along to our team, and I apologize for any hassle that this has caused!

If you have any other questions or need anything else, please let me know!

Catherine_A

I have an increasing number of employees creating Invoices instead of Expense Reports. This is preventing them from providing all of the required detail that we have set in Expense Reports. An account level or at least policy level ability to turn off this feature for those of us large companies that will not use Expensify for invoicing is a must.

Kid

It would be better if we can make the type picklist as configurable. For example, we can close some values on the picklist and let our users can only see some of them. We also met the same issue here that our users create a lot of invoices which is not accept by our workflows and policies. So their reimbursement will be delayed until we can change them back to the expense report.

Sonia Liapounova

@Catherine_A @Kid

Thank you for your feedback!

I have personally found that Scheduled Submit helps me avoid submitting my own expenses as invoices. It's been handy because if a report already exists then any new expense I add to my account is automatically added to that report, and if I don't currently have an open report then a new one is created when I enter a new expense. If you don't want reports submitting automatically then by having it set to the "Manually" frequency which will harvest expenses but won't submit reports.

Do you think this would work for your teams?

Kid

I am not sure. But I will suggest you can have a function like the Category. And we can open or close the certain type of it.

Catherine_A

@Sonia Liapounova Sonia, this will not work for us. Different employees, in different countries, have to submit their expenses in different ways (by trip, by week, by type), so scheduled submit doesn't work for us. I agree with @Kid - there needs to be an ability to toggle off the Invoice feature for those companies that are not using it, either by policy or by domain.

There previously was the ability to do this, so I'm not sure why it was removed.

dsans

Another vote for this. We only ever want employees submitting expenses, never invoices. Whenever they submit an invoice by mistake, it results in an export error, the user has to be contacted, and they have to delete and recreate it correctly. This is a simple error that we should be able to prevent instead of have to react to.

Nicole Mendonca

@dsans, thanks for providing this context!

Chuck

I have had the same issues. Not only does it create confusion for the people who are supposed to approve the reports, it leaves the associate expecting reimbursement hanging. They now have to resubmit the report and wait for reimbursement.

barryh

I just ran into this issue for the first time, caused lots of confusion for both the employee and manager. It would be great to have a fix.