Expensya: Going the extra mile to automate business spend with Google Maps Platform
About Expensya
Expensya automates expense management, empowering businesses and their employees to focus on their core objectives. From payment to reimbursement, the paperless platform covers all expenditures, from general costs to online purchases, daily commute, and per diems.
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About Web Geo Services
From large global players to disruptive startups, Web Geo Services helps businesses leverage Google Maps Platform to maximize user engagement and ROI.
By switching to Google Maps Platform, Expensya achieved zero downtime, reduced support requests by 30%, and achieved early time-to-market for bike ride mileage expense reporting, a feature in high demand.
Results:
- Increases time savings for customers by reducing invoice recognition mistakes by 10%
- Ability to adapts to new regulations faster enables earlier time-to-market for new rollouts such as bike ride mileage feature
- Improves the user experience with rapid response times and an intuitive UI
- Opens up new revenue streams by delivering new features faster, contributing to a 200% revenue growth, even during COVID-19
Boosts productivity, reducing support requests by 30%
Nobody likes expense reports. They’re often tedious to fill out, prone to errors, and costly to process. But for businesses, they’re more than a nuisance. Taking an average of 20 minutes to complete, a single expense report can take up time that employees could be spending on more value-added work. In addition, almost 1 in 5 expense reports contain errors, causing frustration for employees, finance teams, and management alike.
By eliminating manual data entry and paperwork through its integrated cloud-based SaaS solution, Expensya liberates its customers from the work of expense report management. For mileage expenses, for example, all employees need to do is provide their journey start and destination points. Expensya does the rest, ensuring quick and accurate calculations and payouts.
Beyond expense reports, companies of all sizes and sectors use Expensya to automate every stage of business spend processes. “Our mission is not to manage business spend – it’s to remove business spend management as a task,” explains Karim Jouini, Co-founder and CEO of Expensya. “By infusing artificial intelligence into every step of the process, from payment to reimbursement, we empower businesses to focus on their core activities.”
Scaling up with zero downtime
Because most business expenses are related to geographic data, Karim and his team needed to equip their software with accurate real-time location data. Initially, they built their own mapping solution with open-source mapping tools, but as the business started scaling up, they ran into maintenance, performance, and data quality issues.
“We have three demands for our mapping solution: it needs to help us achieve our zero-downtime promise, delight our customers with an excellent user interface, and be fast with high accuracy,” explains Karim. “When our existing solution didn’t live up to our standards, we decided to move to Google Maps Platform, which excels in all three domains.”
Expensya replaced its legacy solution with Google Maps Platform in 2016, steadily expanding its footprint in the cloud. To optimize cloud spend and leverage Google Maps Platform to its fullest, Karim and his team enlisted support from Google Cloud Premier Partner Web Geo Services.
Finding shortcuts to higher accuracy with the Places API and Geocoding API
Getting reimbursed for mileage expenses with Expensya is simple. Employees just need to enter start and destination points in the user-friendly application, and the software does the rest. Expensya uses the Places API to track the journeys of employees, calculating payouts based on factors such as distance, country regulations, vehicle, and employee history. With the Geocoding API, Expensya ranks search results based on the addresses of employees, making it easy to reconstruct their journeys.
Besides empowering employees to quickly fill out their reports, Expensya also uses the Places API and Geocoding API to verify the processing of invoices. Expense reports are prone to human errors, and with Google Maps Platform, Expensya can make sure the data is accurate before each invoice is processed.
“We have three demands for our mapping solution: it needs to help us achieve our zero-downtime promise, delight our customers with an excellent user interface, and be fast with high accuracy. When our existing solution didn’t live up to our standards, we decided to move to Google Maps Platform, which excels in all three domains.”
—Karim Jouini, Co-founder and CEO, ExpensyaCombined with Expensya’s AI capabilities, these solutions make the company’s expense report processes highly accurate, easily auditable for accounting departments, and simple to use for employees. “We’re saving our customers 90% of the time usually spent on expenses and we’ve been ranked the best global invoice recognition software with twice the score of our closest competitor,” says Karim. “We owe part of that success to the fact that we can verify the accuracy of all our location data with Google Maps Platform.”
Higher accuracy on the mapping side is directly tied to the productivity of Expensya’s employees. “Because of the accuracy we’re achieving with the Places API, we’ve seen a 30% decrease of customer support requests, and a 10% decrease in invoice recognition mistakes,” says Karim. “Instead of focusing on mapping, we can use all our talent to build the best solution available.”
Ensuring a snappy user experience with a familiar feel
From the zero-downtime policy to its 24/7 support, user satisfaction is a pillar of Expensya’s success. By integrating dynamic maps with the Maps JavaScript API, mapping directions with the Directions API, Karim and his team simplify the user experience. “Google Maps is the most used consumer navigation app, so when users see it inside Expensya, they like our application more because it feels immediately familiar,” says Karim.
But it’s not just about the feel, it’s also about the speed. For the user, everything in the Expensya platform is built to provide immediate results, without any loading times. With the Distance Matrix API, the application calculates distances for each search result before they’re even selected, ensuring snappy response times and satisfied users.
Combining convenience with regulatory agility
Because expense management is highly dependent on national regulations, Expensya needs to satisfy numerous regulatory requirements around the world. For travel expenses, countries such as Germany and Switzerland have strict rules for Per Diem amounts, basing them not on the general length and duration of the trip, but predefining amounts for every single city, state, or country. Without needing ng to worry about that, employees can simply provide their hotel addresses in Expensya, and the Places API does the rest, matching these addresses with the specific regulatory conditions.
“Because of the accuracy we’re achieving with the Places API, we’ve seen a 30% decrease of customer support requests, and a 10% decrease in invoice recognition mistakes. Instead of focusing on mapping, we can use all our talent to build the best solution available.”
—Karim Jouini, Co-founder and CEO, ExpensyaRecord keeping is another area where Expensya combines added convenience with higher regulatory compliance. Routes and streets often change, so the service must keep a copy of each route that was used to calculate expenses. Because Expensya is 100% paperless, the app helps keep records for 11 years, including start and end address, total distance, and vehicle used. This helps to ensure proof for each transaction, while saving customers the hassle of maintaining documents.
Cycling ahead of the competition
When regulations change, the software needs to adapt quickly. When France started allowing bike ride mileage expenses, employees could suddenly get reimbursed for coming to work by bike, which required a way to accurately measure that distance. Because Google Maps Platform already supported tracking biking routes, Expensya managed to add a corresponding feature two months ahead of the fastest competitor, the same week the regulation changed.
“Google Maps Platform makes Expensya a more agile company by helping us to deploy new features more quickly. By expanding our scope, we’re able to generate much higher revenues. Despite COVID-19, we’ve managed to achieve a 100% growth in revenues in 2020, with three times more users deployed on our platform.”
—Karim Jouini, Co-founder and CEO, ExpensyaBy deploying new features quickly, Expensya taps entirely new revenue streams to ensure steady company growth. Initially founded to streamline travel expense accounting, Expensya now covers every type of business spend. That employees can use the platform for their day-to-day commute became especially important during COVID-19, when most other business trips came to a halt.
“Agility is our main driver for success, and Google Maps Platform makes Expensya a more agile company by helping us to deploy new features more quickly,” says Karim. “By expanding our scope, we’re able to generate much higher revenues. Despite COVID-19, we’ve managed to achieve a 100% growth in revenues in 2020, with three times more users deployed on our platform.”
Expecting this growth to continue in the coming years, Karim and his team are ready to scale, while adding new features to the platform constantly. Currently, they’re exploring the power of Cloud Translation, which could simplify invoice processing globally with real-time text translation for receipts.
While expense reporting is still part of Expensya’s DNA, Karim and his team have turned their platform into a much more versatile tool. “We’ve been able to evolve Expensya into a platform that covers all types of business spend, from travel expenses to administrative costs or strategic purchases,” says Karim. “Google Maps Platform has been an essential part of that evolution, and enables us to focus on delivering the best expense management software on the market.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Expensya
Expensya automates expense management, empowering businesses and their employees to focus on their core objectives. From payment to reimbursement, the paperless platform covers all expenditures, from general costs to online purchases, daily commute, and per diems.
About Web Geo Services
From large global players to disruptive startups, Web Geo Services helps businesses leverage Google Maps Platform to maximize user engagement and ROI.