Goodbye Ideas Section, it’s been quite the ride!
It’s time for the Ideas section to come to a close. Thank you to everyone who contributed their proposals and support to Community Ideas over the past few years.
While well-intentioned, the Ideas section ultimately became a place to go with a ‘wishlist’, where Ideas were rarely engaged with by Expensify users.
Expensify designs and develops software holistically, looking at needs and gaps, and creating solutions with a ‘big picture view’. We have always prided ourselves on not over-complicating the software, adding as few widgets as possible in order to keep things relatively simple for our customers. That customer base is made up of predominantly smaller enterprises with an accounting or admin department of one and we keep that in mind at all times.
While there were some fabulous Ideas implemented (such as duplicate/copy expenses and import company card via CSV), and some we will continue to gather feedback and support on, overwhelmingly the Ideas section was filled with incredibly specialised feature suggestions which were requested to fill the needs of one person or unique scenarios.
We are currently implementing a more robust process for handling feedback and enhancement requests via Concierge without you needing to ‘go somewhere’ and create a formal proposal. In addition to internally tracking feedback on new features and major changes (which we already do), we will also actively vet new suggestions and internally document ideas from customers that we agree would be great to build into Expensify one day.
We’ll also be implementing regular feedback surveys and have already created a specialist team to help you with best-practice advice and re-implementation needs (chat to Concierge if you’d like help with a project like this!). And of course, we’ll regularly re-assess whether this new approach is working, by keeping a close eye on these new feedback surveys.
The plan is to expand our internal monitoring immediately and disable the Ideas section by November 2021.
Please feel free to thread up any questions about the new process, and I’ll do my best to answer them as transparently as possible!
