Expensify
Photograph a receipt on your phone and it reads the merchant, amount and tax, codes the expense and puts it in the approval queue.
What you'd use it for
Getting receipts out of a shoebox and into your accounting software without anyone typing amounts off paper.
- Photograph a receipt and have the merchant, amount and often the tax line read off it, with no manual entry in the normal case
- Track mileage at a distance rate you set, rather than reconstructing journeys from a diary later
- Route expenses through approval and out to QuickBooks Online or Xero, on a paid plan
- Import a personal card feed so receipts match transactions instead of being filed separately
- Book travel inside the same tool and have the expense arrive already coded, on Collect and above
The verdict
Expensify does one small thing very well: it removes the twenty seconds of typing between a paper receipt and a coded expense line, and it does that on a free plan that anyone can start without asking their company. That free plan is unusually real -- unlimited receipt scanning, mileage, expense reports and personal card import -- which makes the decision to pay a decision about approval and reimbursement, not about capture. Collect at $5 a member a month is where reimbursements, corporate card management, travel booking and the QuickBooks and Xero connections arrive, and it is the plan most small businesses will actually want. Control is quote-only, advertised as low as $9 per active member, and is for ERP and SSO rather than better expenses. The pitch to weigh against it is the card platforms: if you are already issuing cards through Ramp or Brex, expense tracking probably came with them.
What it costs
| Tier | Price | For | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 for all members, with no company approval needed to start | An individual or a business that wants capture without an approval chain. | Unlimited receipt scanning, mileage tracking, expense reports, categories and tags, custom distance and tax rates, personal card import, chat on every expense, and 24/7 support from both AI and humans. |
| Collect | $5 per member per month, with discounts for an annual commitment or for using the Expensify Card | The small-business plan, and the one most teams reading this will want. | Everything in Free, plus reimbursements, corporate card management, expense and travel approvals, travel booking with rules, QuickBooks Online and Xero integrations, and chat on expenses, reports and rooms. |
| Control | Custom pricing, advertised as low as $9 per active member per month | Larger businesses needing an ERP connection, SSO and layered approvals. | Everything in Collect, plus multiple approval flows, custom expense rules, NetSuite and Sage Intacct integration, HR integrations with Workday and Certinia, SAML/SSO, custom insights and reporting, and budgeting. An account manager is available on accounts of 100 or more members. |
Read from Expensify's own pricing page on 25 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.
What you need to start
- A phone with a camera, which is where the feature people actually buy this for lives
- A QuickBooks Online or Xero account if you want expenses to land in your books automatically, and a paid plan for that connection
- A bank connection before reimbursements can be paid, which is Collect and above
Minutes to a first scanned receipt on the free plan, with no company approval and no card. Connecting accounting software, setting approval rules and inviting a team is a separate afternoon, and it only applies once you are paying.
Your first run Install the app, photograph one receipt, and within a minute or so you have a coded expense line with merchant, amount and tax filled in -- that single receipt is the honest test of whether the OCR handles the kind you actually collect.
Where it breaks
Two things on the pricing page are worth reading twice. Control is billed per *active* member rather than per member, so the bill moves with usage in a way Collect's does not, and the $9 figure is a floor on a quote rather than a price. And the Expensify Card's headline is up to 2% cash back, where the footnote gives 1% on all US purchases with no minimum and 2% only above $250,000 of monthly spend -- so for almost every business reading this the number is 1%. Card use also earns a discount of up to 50% on the subscription itself, which changes the comparison against a card platform.
Web, iOS, Android and a desktop app; the mobile receipt-scanning camera is the feature most people actually use it for. Prices can be shown in USD, GBP, AUD, NZD or EUR from a switcher on the pricing page.
Previously unpublished: expensify.com/pricing is a client-rendered app that returned an empty shell to every fetch, so the entry carried no figures and was held as a draft. Read in a browser and now published with the full three-plan structure.
When not to use it
Not for a business that has already moved its spend onto a corporate card platform like Ramp or Brex -- expense capture is bundled there, and paying separately for it is duplication. Not for anyone whose receipts are mostly digital invoices arriving by email, since the value here is the camera and the paper. And read the free plan carefully before building a workflow on it: Expensify's own plan card lists categories and tags as included, while its pricing FAQ says expense categorisation requires a paid plan, so confirm which is true for your account before assuming free covers coding as well as capture.
The job Expensify does is small and specific: turn a crumpled paper receipt into a coded, categorised, submitted expense line before you’ve left the restaurant. The OCR reads the merchant, the amount and often the tax line well enough that most receipts need no manual correction, which is the actual time saved — not the expense report itself, but the twenty seconds of typing it used to require.
That triggers on your action rather than running on a schedule — you photograph a receipt, it processes that one receipt — which puts it above a static form and below something that watches your accounts and acts without being shown anything. Approval workflows and export to accounting software (into QuickBooks or Xero, typically) sit on top of the capture step.
The free plan is the product, and the paid plan is the process
Expensify’s free tier is more generous than it first looks and its boundary is unusual. Unlimited receipt scanning, mileage tracking, expense reports and personal card import are all free, for any individual, with no company approval needed to sign up. What free does not include is anything to do with other people: reimbursement, approval chains, corporate card management, and the connections to QuickBooks and Xero.
That is a coherent line and a useful one. If your question is “can this read my receipts accurately enough”, you can answer it for nothing, this afternoon, on your own phone. If your question is “can this run our expense process”, that starts at $5 a member a month on Collect.
One caution. The Free plan card lists “categories and tags” as included, while the pricing FAQ on the same page says that additional functionality such as expense categorisation requires a paid plan. Those cannot both be right. Confirm what your own free account actually does before planning around it.
The card discount is the number that moves the comparison
Expensify sells a card alongside the software, and two things follow from it that a straight feature comparison misses.
The advertised cash back is “up to 2%”. The footnote gives 1% on all US purchases with no minimum, and 2% only on monthly spend above $250,000 — so for almost every business reading this, the rate is 1%.
More materially, using the card earns a discount of up to 50% on the subscription itself. That is what makes the comparison against a card-first platform interesting rather than obvious: Expensify is not only competing on expense features, it is competing for the same card spend that funds Ramp and Brex.
Where it fits
Against Ramp or Brex, the comparison is really about what else you want bundled in — those platforms build expense tracking on top of a corporate card programme, where Expensify’s core strength stays the capture and coding of a receipt regardless of which card it was on. A business already issuing cards through one of those platforms may find expense tracking already included; one still reimbursing receipts individually is closer to Expensify’s original use case.
Alternatives
Money & invoicingAgentsRamp
Corporate cards and expense software where AI reviews every transaction, flags policy violations, and reconciles receipts automatically, free for smaller teams.
Brex
Corporate cards and expense management that checks spend against your policy automatically and matches receipts to transactions without anyone filing them.
Money & invoicingAgentsXero
Cloud accounting that reconciles your bank feed, reads incoming bills, and forecasts cash flow, aimed at replacing desktop bookkeeping software.
Money & invoicingAgentsQuickBooks
Bookkeeping, invoicing and payroll for small businesses, with Intuit's AI categorising bank transactions, matching receipts and chasing unpaid invoices on its own.
Get Expensify
Buying the tool is not the hard part.
The ebook is about what to hand over, in what order, and how you find out when it goes wrong. One payment, no subscription.