Shortcut for sending receipts to Expensify from a Mac

tylerzoll
tylerzoll Approved! Accountant Posts: 430 Expensify Champion
edited June 2018 in Best Practices

I have a small hack that gets receipts into expensify using Automator on the Mac. I though I would post this and see if there are any other better ways that folks use on a regular basis, but this saves me lots of time every month. This is how it works:

On the Mac, when you click print, you have the option at the bottom of the print dialogue box to print to PDF. Using Automator, you can also basically add an option to print to Expensify so it's as quick and easy as this:

I basically use the keyboard shortcut ⌘P when I am on a web page in Chrome or Safari, then send to Expensify. This way I can get something to expensify whatever program I'm in as long as it allows printing. This works really well especially because our travel agent uses a website that is not friendly with Expensify. The emailed receipts just include links to the website.

The automator script does the following actions:
1. Print the page as a PDF
2. Open email in the background and attach the PDF
3. Selects the proper from account (my expensify user id)
4. Enter receipts@expensify.com in the to line
5. send the email

You can download the attached file or just follow the steps below to create your own. It's pretty easy even if you've never used automator before.

  1. Open the Automator app or press ⌘space to find it.
  2. Create a new document
  3. Select Print Plugin
  4. Add a new step by selecting mail, then create new message
  5. Fill in the details that are necessary to send a receipt by email to expensify.
    to: receipts@expensify.com
    subject: Receipt to Expensify
    Important: Make sure that the account that the workflow sends from is listed as a user account on your expensify account.You can use the default account, but I select my work account so that way if something changes in my mail, I don't have an issue.
  6. I make sure that the Show this action when the workflow runs box is unchecked.
  7. Add a new step to send outgoing message
  8. Save the workflow

You can email this workflow to other folks that use a Mac and install it for them.

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