Feature Request: Billable-only PDF Reports
I have clients who requires receipts when expenses are billed. Typically, we download the PDF of the report and include it with the invoice. A couple of clients have requested that we take off the non-billable expenses and related receipts that are listed and attached to the report pdf. They get confused by the non-billable expenses. I'd also rather not have them see the non-billable expenses.
The only way I've been able to accomplish this so far is to manually edit the pdf using white boxes to shade out the non-billable expenses. I also go through the receipts to remove non-billable receipts. It's very time consuming and not practical.
It would be great if I could download a billable-only PDF report that only includes billable expenses to then include with the Xero invoice.
Comments
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Sophie_Pinto Expensify Customer, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 133 Expensify Team
Hi @loganhinders,
Have you taken a look at export CSV templates? Take a look at the default ones already in your account or you can build your own CSV template, where there is a formula for exporting the billable status.
It's not available in PDF format, however.
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Hi @Sophie_Pinto, I have seen those. From what I have seen, the csv would get us the billable data, but not the receipts. We have to include receipt images, so the csv doesn't help.
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Sophie_Pinto Expensify Customer, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 133 Expensify Team
@loganhinders - thanks for the clarification. This is more of a product philosophy in that given Expensify stores the receipt images for you to access, we haven't built a way for you to download the images other than via PDF. You can read more about that in this conversation here.
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@Sophie_Pinto looks like that link is broken. I still want the pdf report, just a version with only billable expenses. It seems like that would be a pretty simple filter to get a modified version of the report. That would allow me to give clients a clean report with only billable expenses. The alternative for me is to either manually edit and block out information on the pdf or require team members to submit two reports, one billable and one not-billable.
It would be helpful to have a bit more customization to that pdf report, where the receipt images are included.
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Thanks for the feedback @loganhinders but because of the product philosophy @Sophie_Pinto outlined, customizing PDF report options further isn't something that is on our roadmap to address. I can appreciate that this may be a disappointing response, but we'd rather be upfront about the limitation of Expensify to your use-case here.
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@LaurenR_Expensify @Sophie_Pinto understood, but still making the feature request for others to upvote if they have a similar need. Could you send a fixed link to the product philosophy that you are referencing? The original link did not work. Thanks
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@loganhinders we're actually sunsetting the Ideas section. The best option for you at this moment is to use a custom CSV and include the receipt URLs. That's what most of our customers that bill customers use. In your policy expense settings you can then choose to make receipt URLs public so that your clients can view them. I hope this helps!
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@Flavia Faria Oh interesting, I did not know that the csv had links to the receipt images. Thanks for pointing out that feature, I had not seen it on the csv reports that I have used in the past. It is still not ideal for our clients to have to click a separate link for every receipt, when the pdf report includes that in one document. But I will take what I can get since @Sophie_Pinto or @LaurenR_Expensify have (not so clearly) reinforced that you have some product philosophy where you won't consider feature requests. (both of you mentioned this product philosophy but no one corrected the link when I mentioned it was not working...)
Thanks for letting me know you aren't listening though :) You might want to delete this post if you're not accepting feature requests anymore... https://community.expensify.com/discussion/5219/how-to-share-your-feature-request-with-expensify
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Cortney Ofstad Expensify Success Coach - Admin, Expensify Team, Expensify Student Ambassador Posts: 173 Expensify Team
@loganhinders — sorry for the confusion, and I'll pass that along to the team ASAP!
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@loganhinders : I think that the URL in the .csv file is (somewhat) new because when we first began using Expensify about 2 years ago, I think that I had asked about it as a workaround for this problem. I did do an export of a set of our client expenses last week, and noticed it (the URL column) can be included now.
I'm thinking about trying to develop some sort of automated process which could "import" that .csv export, get the URLs, download the attachments, and then put them all into a single PDF. It would be much nicer if I could just do that directly in Expensify, but at least this automation would be easier than what we have to do today with manually downloading each attachment one at a time.
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@BrettB Did you find a way to automate this? I too need to download all billable receipts and attach them to an invoice.
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@Sophie_Pinto @Flavia Faria @Cortney Ofstad finally trying this, but since I had not dealt with it since last year, I did not recall the disclaimer to turn on public receipt visibility. Instead of taking my client to a page that says they don't have access, it just took them to a 404 that says the page cannot be found. That's misleading. It would be super helpful if that page said they did not have access.
Since there was no accurate error message, there was no way for me to troubleshoot and realize that it was a simple setting. My client sent another 404 page this month so I reached out to support hoping there would be an easier way to download receipts by now instead of this workaround that is inconvenient for the client. I ended up coming back to this thread while chatting with support where I found the issue myself.
Even after telling support it was a 404 error, it took 30 minutes of chatting about the receipt download question before I found that it was a simple setting. If the 404 page was a "no access" page, I would have found the setting last month and never had to reach out to support in the first place.
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Thanks for reaching out here Logan! I'm sorry it took you a while to find the setting, and I can completely understand why the error message is a little confusing.
We will keep your suggestion in mind, however as my colleague Flavia mentioned, we have sunsetted the Ideas section of Expensify in order to focus on high-priority areas of the product.
Thanks again for taking the time to let us know about your experience!
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@Kadie Alexander your support could not diagnose after being told the exact error.