Expensify vs QuickBooks Online

Expensify is one of the original expense management solutions on the market. It gives companies the ability to scan receipts, submit expense reports, reimburse employees, and sync all of that to accounting software.

We actually used Expensify for the first few years in business. It started as a simple invoice/receipt scraping tool that you'd forward your receipts into receipts@expensifydotcom via email, and it would pull out all of the details, learn from past classifications, and sync that over to your accounting software like QBO or Xero.

They have more recently moved into the virtual credit card experience, realizing that if the charge starts with a virtual credit card, all the categorization is way more consistent and seamless.

But if you're a modern SMB looking for a modern expense management tool with great automation built in, Expensify just feels a bit…legacy.

• Easy receipt scanning and expense submission
• Supports bring your own cards (10k+ banks globally)
• Accounting integrations (QuickBooks, NetSuite, Xero, etc.)

• Still built around traditional expense reports
• Less opinionated real-time spend control compared to card-first platforms
• Per-member pricing can add up as your team scales
• It's an older tool, the features that used to make it stand out just aren't unique or cutting edge anymore

Expensify is the only expense management solution on this list that lets you plug in your existing corporate cards from 10k+ banks instead of requiring you to use their virtual cards.

This is great if you don’t want to mess with switching banks or overhauling your setup. But it also means Expensify isn’t really built around the card itself. You often track and approve after the spend happens and you don't really get the same level of real-time card controls as you would with something like Ramp.

It’s more about tracking what already happened than controlling spend before it does. So things can slip through and only get caught after the fact.

As you'd expect, you can scan receipts, auto-categorize, submit reports, approve, and reimburse via Expensify.

Expensify lets you reimburse employees and contractors anywhere in the world in their local currency. For distributed teams that rely heavily on reimbursements, this is genuinely useful.

• Free for individuals
• Paid plans start at $5 per member per month

On paper, $5 per member sounds inexpensive. But as a modern SMB grows to 20, 50, or 100 employees, that becomes a meaningful recurring cost, especially when many card-first platforms charge $0 in software fees and monetize through interchange instead.

We find that teams based in the US tend to use QuickBooks Online, and businesses outside of the US tend to lean more toward Xero.

This is important because it means that the features QBO is building is more focused on things like US Sales Tax laws, while Xero may have more accounting features helpful outside of the US especially.

Also, accountants inside of the US are often more proficient with QBO as compared to Xero (although they should be familiar with both).

P.S. We highly recommend QBO over QuickBooks Desktop because of their robust API—you're not going to be integrating QuickBooks Desktop easily with anything.

QBO helps companies manage core financial tasks like invoicing, expense tracking, bank reconciliation, financial reporting, and tax preparation.

This is one of those areas that it makes sense that they cover, but you can tell it was an add-on versus being their core service. Payroll is boring, and hey, QBO does the job, it's just not a straightforward user-experience, and let's just say we used it for 4 years before switching to Gusto, and there's not a single bone in my body that misses QBO for payroll. It was also incredibly painful closing it down with them, reporting to all the Department of Labor agencies, and everything. Save yourself the time and skip out on QBO for Payroll.

If you compare QuickBooks Online to any of the best time tracking software on the market, you'll see just how wildly barebones, slow, and underwhelming it is. Even just the process of logging into QBO feels like you're pushing a boulder uphill, now you need to do it any time you track software? No thanks, I'll pass.

They designed it more to be for people who just need to submit their time one-per-day or once-per-week, they are building to check a box, not to be leading the time tracking space.