Expensify Stock: Making Expense Reports Great Again

The stench of American politics has gotten a whole lot worse lately in Portland, Oregon, a city with squalor that makes third-world favelas look orderly and structured. Take a drive through the city’s main arterials and you’ll quickly notice all the crudely erected structures with garbage overflowing onto the streets. Instead of addressing this gaping sore, the city’s leadership seems to ignore it. Keep Portland weird indeed.

The problem exists because the American political party controlling the city is pulling an ostrich maneuver as America’s other political party rubs the problem in their faces. Occasionally, extremists from both parties battle it out on the streets, some even exchanging bullets. Despite the problems Portland is having, talented people get on with getting stuff done. One success story coming out of the City of Roses is Expensify, a company that helps other companies manage expense reports.

The Problem with Expense Reports

The way firms spend money on travel is inefficient and wasteful, to say the least. In most companies, travel planning happens through third-party service providers such as American Express who have no incentive to control spend. Neither do the employees who are often given “not to exceed” numbers for traveling to various locations. If you give an employee visiting Tokyo a $150 per diem, you can bet they’ll try to max it out. That’s about $2,100 for a two-week visit. Then there’s the hotel at $450 a night, and the overpriced airfare Amex booked. A two-week business trip could easily approach $10,000, and that’s before the cost of having the employee spend their valuable time filling out expense forms for their trip with accompanying receipts.

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