What Expensify does

Expensify offers different software tools to help businesses track, record and manage expenses.

Employees can report an expense for reimbursement by snapping a photo of a receipt. The software can take care of paying a customer's bills, it can create, send and manage invoices, and it can also book flights for business travel. In addition, Expensify has a business credit card and features that allow users to split bills, request payments and chat with friends.

In 2020, the company saw a total addressable market of roughly $21.5 billion in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia, according to the filing.

Expensify's financials

Like many software-as-a-service companies, Expensify is running at a break-even point right now. But its financials improved dramatically in the first half of 2021.

• Expensify reported a loss of $1.7 million, on revenue of $88 million in 2020, compared to a profit of $1.2 million on revenue of $80.5 million in 2019.
• But in just the first six months of 2021, the company reported sales of $65 million, up from $40.6 million in the year-ago period.
• The company's profit also jumped fourfold to $14.7 million in the first six months of this year, from $3.5 million the same period last year.

What could go wrong

As with other fintech companies, Expensify has taken a hit from the COVID-19 crisis. But the pandemic also created opportunities.

The pandemic and the pivot to remote work led to "declines in revenue" and "a decrease in business travel and other expense-generating activity" as small and medium-sized businesses downsized or went out of business, the company said in its registration statement.

But Expensify said it also saw strong growth as the businesses that managed to survive and even thrive in the crisis turned to cloud-based vendors to help run their business. Still, as the company also noted in its IPO filing, "those growth rates may not be indicative of our future growth, and we may not be able to maintain profitability."

Then there's the competition. Expensify is up against tough rivals, including tech giants like Oracle (with its NetSuite product), SAP, Workday and Intuit.

What people are saying

• "We just survived Trump. This is going to be an amazing year," Expensify CEO David Barrett told Protocol in January. "The economy's coming back. The vaccines are rolling out. Travel is going to restart. We've got a new administration that's going to make reasonable decisions. We avoided a civil war. Everything's on the up and up."
• "This was a moment that utterly transcended politics as usual, and his statement utterly transcended politics as usual," futurist and historian Paul Saffo told Protocol at the time. "I'm sure investors got a little bit of a case of indigestion over this. It was a bold move and I would say it was made with considerable character."
• "As business leaders, it's just shameful to just sit out this entire thing," Barrett said. "It's like, 'Oh, remember that one time when we almost had a civil war? What did you do about it? Oh, fucking nothing? Oh, good job.'"