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.

While QuickBooks Online includes some basic expense tracking features, it is not a full expense management solution. For example, QBO does not provide robust support for virtual cards or company-wide spending controls.

Some people have mentioned that QuickBooks Online allows for some expense management features like virtual credit cards, that said, a tool like Bill Spend & Expense (formerly Divvy) does so much more for expense management than simply allowing for a one-off virtual card though. Unlike QBO, a proper expense management tool allows you to go deeper, as it ties in individual and team budgets (across the entire company), all to ensure your company only allocates what they have budgeted for.

QBO also does not have proper receipt matching that automatically ties the receipt from your email to the individual transaction.

QBO does not have credit card rewards with their virtual credit card solution either.