I need to print some receipts but can't for the life of me work out how!

psheld
psheld Expensify Customer Posts: 23 Expensify Newcomer

I must be missing something really basic, so forgive me.

I want to export to PDF the receipts from a certain date with a certain tag. Easy as that.

How do I do that? All I can see is a CSV export feature.

Thanks in advance.

«1

Answers

  • Rachael Hopkins
    Rachael Hopkins Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 904 Expensify Team

    Hi @psheld,

    You can add all expenses to one expense report, and that report can be exported as a PDF then printed.

    OR, if the expenses are on different expense reports, you can export to CSV, and each receipt can be opened from the link in the CSV if needed in future.

    Can you elaborate on why you need to print hardcopies of your receipts?

  • psheld
    psheld Expensify Customer Posts: 23 Expensify Newcomer

    Thanks @RachCHopkins.

    When I try to create an expense report with these receipts, I find that none are available. I'm guessing that a receipt can only be added to one report, and Expensify has been adding the receipts to reports automatically.

    Basically, my client has, quite reasonably, asked me to evidence the expenses I've added to my invoices this year-to-date. I don't need to print a hardcopy, but I do need a PDF showing the receipts.

    Your proposal to create a CSV and then following individual links isn't going to work. My client doesn't have access to my Expensify account.

    Do I have to stop Expensify automatically creating reports? Do I have to undo the reports year-to-date and create new ones?

    Thanks again.

  • Nicole Trepanier
    Nicole Trepanier Expensify Team Posts: 498 Expensify Team

    @psheldYou don't need access to your Expensify accounts to view the receipt images under the links we export with a CSV. These links open the receipt image directly rather than the report itself.

  • psheld
    psheld Expensify Customer Posts: 23 Expensify Newcomer
    edited April 2019

    Forgive me Nicole, but I really like to keep clients happy. Sending a hundred + receipts in a PDF is nice and convenient. Sending a hundred links they have to click is not. Really not.

    If I interpret your responses here correctly, I think you're telling me that whereas I can feed receipts into Expensify really easily, it's extremely reluctant to let me get at them afterwards. I'm doing myself a disservice by using Expensify.

    Are you adamant that I can't do something so fundamentally basic as this?

    Thanks again for your help here. Philip.

  • Nicole Trepanier
    Nicole Trepanier Expensify Team Posts: 498 Expensify Team

    @psheld Unfortunately, PDFs can only be exported on a per report basis. In that format, they are easy to export but we don't have a better option for downloading these together if they aren't in the same report.

  • psheld
    psheld Expensify Customer Posts: 23 Expensify Newcomer

    Hi Nicole, thanks for your prompt replies here. That much I can appreciate.

    What I cannot understand is how anyone engineering such a service (and I'm talking as someone with software architecture experience) would make an innately flexible database so utterly rigid and, frankly, a UX misery.

    I can't put it any other way than to conclude that Expensify's service design is a bit of a cock-up. You'll forgive the language I hope when I point out that I'm now in a worse place than before I chose to use Expensify. I had recommended Expensify to a couple of people, and I will be rescinding those immediately. Now I need to invest time to find an alternative system that better understands the user, and migrate. Joy.

    I hope my feedback, as blunt as it is, might serve some good purpose at your company. Best regards, Philip.

  • psheld
    psheld Expensify Customer Posts: 23 Expensify Newcomer
    edited April 2019

    I don't suppose you make it easy for your customers to leave do you?

    Where can I find the "download everything" button?

    If no such button exists, perhaps you'll be good enough to zip up all the receipts and make them available to me to download?

  • Ted Harris
    Ted Harris Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 359 Expensify Team

    Hi @psheld, just coming back to this quickly to make sure we understand your workflow correctly, as it doesn't necessarily sound like a common request we come across.

    my client has, quite reasonably, asked me to evidence the expenses I've added to my invoices this year-to-date

    Is it normal for clients to request this, specifically a years worth of receipts, within one PDF, rather than sending this monthly with the invoice? I'm not sure I follow when you say:

    Sending a hundred + receipts in a PDF is nice and convenient

    After all, most of the value Expensify adds revolves around the accounting integration, reconciliation, coding, automation and approvals in addition to SmartScan, we don’t typically get requests to download a year’s worth of receipt images in a standalone fashion. A receipt image is tied to an expense as a reference point. An expense contains more detail (expense type, comments, client codes and so on) than a standalone receipt image and those expenses collectively are added to an expense report, that customers align to the frequency in which they invoice their clients for reimbursement.

    If it's just the case that you'd prefer to document a PDF's worth of expenses annually for a client without the other benefits, it's possible you're right in your latest tweet.

    Does this client, or do many clients typically require expenses to go through the expense process weekly/monthly/quarterly etc, but then also require another review annually too? I accept here that I think my understanding of the problem may actually be completely incorrect, so any more light you can shed here would be fantastic.

    Finally, you're correct when you say:

    I'm guessing that a receipt can only be added to one report

    ...but this certainly doesn't stop you using the "Copy" report function to copy those receipts in order to create a new Invoice or Expense Report.

    This will create a new report containing a copy of those expenses. You can do that with as many reports as you like and once done, you can merge those reports together.

    Regarding full export of images, we've addressed this previously here, but there's also an idea here you could lend your vote to that hasn't seen much support so far.

  • psheld
    psheld Expensify Customer Posts: 23 Expensify Newcomer

    Hi Ted,

    You will know your product better than me, so I'm happy to be guided by you. Of course! My business is very simple, so thanks for asking me to explain.

    I upload receipts. Some of these are reimbursable and I tag these with the client's name.

    I invoice the customer. They pay.

    Now and then, customers with sound financial governance will do an audit to make sure that the expenses I'm invoicing have been incurred. In this instance, I have been asked to send over the receipts from the start of 2019. This means the CSV for ease of reconciliation, and the corresponding (images of) receipts.

  • psheld
    psheld Expensify Customer Posts: 23 Expensify Newcomer

    So sorry not to see a response here.

    In short, I think this is the situation:

    1. Expensify doesn't enable access to my own receipts
    2. Expensify doesn't offer anyway for customers to leave its services gracefully, unlike some competitors.

    Do let me know if I have this wrong? I'm still hoping you can prove the 2nd one wrong, of course!

  • Ted Harris
    Ted Harris Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 359 Expensify Team

    Hi @psheld, sorry for the late response here. A fair few of us were out at a conference for the last few days. I'd definitely encourage you to reach out to Expensify support (concierge@expensify.com) for a quicker response to issues - the Community itself is a forum for all Expensify users to share their thoughts and opinions, but we try to do our best to provide insight and help where we can.

    Coming back to this though, I think my main point of confusion for your use case stems from this

    I upload receipts. Some of these are reimbursable and I tag these with the client's name.

    I invoice the customer. They pay.

    Now and then, customers with sound financial governance will do an audit to make sure that the expenses I'm invoicing have been incurred.

    I think my main confusion initially arose from not understanding that it was fairly common to invoice without the receipts originally. However, after discussing this with a colleague who informs me this is common, it's also never a pushback they've seen on just having URL's, or copies of the receipts in a PDF from copied reports, as I outlined you could do previously. Do you know what your client's primary issue is with reviewing receipts in a PDF or via URL's? As a cloud based system, it's definitely seen as preferred to not have to worry about sending/storing files when sharing them.

    Regarding switching services, I'm happy to go through where your pain points are here too though. As you can maintain an Expensify account free of charge, retain access to all of your previous expenses and the freedom to share them, migrating away from Expensify should really just mean cancelling any subscription and paid policies to downgrade to free and then just beginning to use your new provider. Our team are definitely happy to help with that whenever you like.

  • psheld
    psheld Expensify Customer Posts: 23 Expensify Newcomer

    Do you know what your client's primary issue is with reviewing receipts in a PDF or via URL's?

    At the moment, they have my invoice list the expenses. Sending them another table listing the expenses doesn't help them much with their audit.

    If your reference to a PDF includes the images of the receipts themselves, then 100%. That's what I need. For all the appropriately tagged receipts between two dates. Simple. To repeat, no client is going to click on a link per receipt ... not a chance.

    you can maintain an Expensify account free of charge, retain access to all of your previous expenses and the freedom to share them

    I need to get my receipts out of Expensify into a competing service to do what I've said I need to do. Leaving them behind in Expensify does not solve my problem!

    Do you or do you not make it easy for customers to download everything and leave?


    Thanks.

  • Ted Harris
    Ted Harris Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 359 Expensify Team

    I'll definitely leave this open to the Community but I can attest that clicking links to receipts certainly isn't something we see pushback on from accounting firms or clients. It's possible they've found another workaround I haven't thought of, or it isn't something they come across themselves.

    Is your client specifically saying that scrolling through a PDF of expenses matching them 1:1 with an invoice you've previously sent is a quicker process than clicking on the link to view a receipt beside the expense they're looking for? Or were they looking for some sort of .zip file with each receipt's name listed by merchant, date and amount etc?

    (That's certainly not something we could facilitate, but you could do this by using the API to harvest those URL's and download via a cURL request and it seems like the only thing that might be quicker to me.)

    I need to get my receipts out of Expensify into a competing service to do what I've said I need to do.

    I think this is where I misunderstood you. I apologise, I'd assumed you were just moving somewhere else from now on and didn't require access to prior expenses that had already been reported in Expensify. For that, I'm not actually sure what your best bet would be.

    Do you or do you not make it easy for customers to download everything and leave?

    We certainly make it easy to export everything, but only up to the URL's which most users haven't raised any issues about. Exporting the direct receipt images is not something we'll facilitate right now. As I said earlier though, we're open to the idea if it seems to be something a significant subset of users actually want though!

  • psheld
    psheld Expensify Customer Posts: 23 Expensify Newcomer

    Thanks Ted.

    Expensify does not understand the real world, or at least my experience of it over 25 years of consulting.

    It seems that submitting a GDPR request is going to be the only way to extricate myself from your system's constraints. I will now email privacy@expensify.com, point them to this thread, and get my data back that way.

    Crazy.

  • psheld
    psheld Expensify Customer Posts: 23 Expensify Newcomer
    edited May 2019

    Email sent:


    "Hi,

    May I refer you to this thread on your customer support forum:

    https://community.expensify.com/discussion/comment/10122

    I would like all my data please, including each and every receipt scan.

    I look forward to hearing from you, but please shout if you need further clarification.

    Best..."

  • Ted Harris
    Ted Harris Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 359 Expensify Team

    Hi @psheld, as I say, it's certainly not something we've seen as a requirement from customers in our ten years of operating, but we are always open to it if it becomes a requirement.

    I'll do my best to chase up your email, but I can't yet see it in our support system. Could you confirm that you send this to concierge@expensify.com?

  • psheld
    psheld Expensify Customer Posts: 23 Expensify Newcomer

    Thanks Ted. If only the Expensify service was as delightful as the customer support!

    I had emailed privacy@. Now forwarded to concierge@.

  • RTischler
    RTischler Expensify Customer Posts: 1

    I also needed to get copies of only some of my receipts from my reports. From a web search I found these steps to handle what I needed.

    1.      In Expensify, open the report containing the desired receipts.

    2.      Use the “Generate PDF” button on the left to download the report PDF file.

    3.      Open the downloaded PDF file in Adobe Reader (free version) and scroll to

    the page showing the desired receipt(s).

    4.      In Adobe Reader, File->Print.

    5.      Set the printer to “Microsoft Print to PDF”.

    6.      Select the page(s) to print and hit the print button.

    7.      Enter a file name to save to and hit the Save button.

    This new file will contain only the desired receipts. You can send it to the customer. Or you can open this new file in Adobe Reader and print.

     

    I hope this helps.

     

  • Greystoke
    Greystoke Expensify Customer Posts: 2
    This is the most frustrating situation. I've read a couple of threads about this and all I hear is that we don't need to be able to download our own receipts.
    Well, I do. I use the app for expenses with one of my clients. They pay for the app. When I don't work for them anymore, I won't have access to the full version of the app without paying for it myself. I don't know or care whether the free version will still allow me to download the receipts. As a business in my own right, I need to be able to maintain these receipts in my own central database. I choose and want to do it that way. And it looks like a lot of other people are the same. I don't want a list of links to individual receipts and it the reason for that should be irrelevant to Expensify, as it is a reasonable measure for any business to want to maintain its own records.
    It frustrates me that your developers and engineers, think they know the business needs and tax requirements of a geologist in Australia or a plumber in Argentina.
  • Rachael Hopkins
    Rachael Hopkins Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 904 Expensify Team

    Hi @Greystoke Welcome to the Expensify Community!

    Expensify is designed to use electronically. It's really up to the geologist in Australia or the plumber in Argentina to decide whether this suits their needs.

    Is there a reason why you don't invoice your client for your disbursements? It sounds like Expensify is really being used in a way it's not really meant for. Don't get me wrong, people can use it however they want, but sometimes it means the outcome is not the best if it's being used for a custom purpose.

    If you can tell me more, maybe I can help you think outside the square. But I can tell you up front that this is unlikely to change in the near future.

  • StephanieL789
    StephanieL789 Expensify Customer Posts: 29 Expensify Admirer
    Is there a reason you all continuously refuse to provide a method to facilitate this reasonable request?

    Printing the individual reports to PDF, then cutting the pieces out of them to reassemble into a new document is NOT A REASONABLE SOLUTION!
  • Jeremy Boniface
    Jeremy Boniface Expensify Team Posts: 202 Expensify Team
    @StephanieL789
    I don't quite understand your use-case -- can you clarify a bit further what your process looks like? I'd love to discuss further. Please feel free to reach out to concierge@expensify.com, as well!
  • StephanieL789
    StephanieL789 Expensify Customer Posts: 29 Expensify Admirer
    It doesn't really matter why i want them... But in this case, this time around, our tax preparer has asked for proof of our donations.  I can filter for the category donations and the period in question.  They are all visible on the screen. You would think I could then print using the browser's print feature, but when you do, you get the "report" part, but where the receipt shows on the screen, it does not print.  There is no way to print them all at once.  I have to go into each one individually, print it to PDF and then in Adobe, I combine all those individual PDFs to one document to send to the outside accountant. It is excessively frustrating that the oft-asked for feature is totally ignored by Expensify and we have to explain repeatedly why we would possibly want it.  This is one of the more requested features and it makes no sense why the customers are ignored.
  • Cortney Ofstad
    Cortney Ofstad Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 173 Expensify Team
    Thanks for responding @StephanieL789 and providing additional context! It is odd that the receipts are not appearing when you attempt to generate a PDF copy of a report. If possible, can you reach out to concierge@expensify.com so we can troubleshoot further using your account details? 

    Thanks and we look forward to hearing back from you!
  • Berk
    Berk Expensify Customer Posts: 1
    Has there been an update on this topic? I've seen this same issue come up on several boards.  Does Expensify have a timeline of when customers will be able to generate a) a pdf of expenses across many reports or b) a pdf of specific expenses within a single report?
  • Jason Li
    Jason Li Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 229 Expensify Team
    Hi @Berk - thanks for writing in! At the moment, Expensify doesn't have plans to allow users to generate a PDF of expenses across multiple Reports, but we'd love to hear your use case!

    In regards to your second question are you looking to only generate a specific number or set of expenses (i.e. not all the expenses) from a Report? For example - your Report contains 50 expenses but you only want to generate a PDF of 20 of those expenses.
  • psheld
    psheld Expensify Customer Posts: 23 Expensify Newcomer
    Hi Jason,

    Wondering if your marketing team would be OK adding your words in large bold font on the Expensify homepage please:

    "Expensify doesn't have plans to allow users to generate a PDF of expenses across multiple Reports"

    Had I and others known this upfront, we wouldn't be wasting our time and yours here.

    As for my emails referenced earlier in this thread to privacy@ and concierge@, I never received any reply, putting Expensify in non-compliance with the GDPR.

  • Brigid  Bello
    Brigid Bello Expensify Team Posts: 77 Expensify Team
    Hey @psheld, sorry for the mixup! I can see that Ted responded to your email quite a while ago, but that it hasn't been seen yet, so there might have been a delivery issue. No worries though, I can relay the gist of the message here: Our compliance and privacy team assessed this situation and were able to confirm that we've complied with our obligations to provide users access to their personal information via the self-service tools in the product that we've discussed in this thread. You can read more about our commitment to GDPR here. Let me know if there's anything else I can help you with! 
  • psheld
    psheld Expensify Customer Posts: 23 Expensify Newcomer
    Thanks Brigid.

    GDPR Article 20 reads: "The data subject shall have the right to receive the personal data concerning him or her, which he or she has provided to a controller, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and have the right to transmit those data to another controller without hindrance from the controller to which the personal data have been provided ..."

    May I have all my data please in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format? Or instructions for effecting such an export?

    Thanks in advance.