What is Expensify Chat?

Expensify Chat is an ideal way to collaborate on expenses or payment requests by communicating in real-time with your accountant, clients, employees, or, friends.

With Expensify Chat, you can start a conversation about that missing receipt your employee forgot to submit or chat about splitting that electric bill with your roommates. Through eChat, you can even request money from your friends after a night out on the town!

How to use Chat in Expensify

Download NewExpensify from the App Store or Google Play to use the chat function. You can also access your account at new.expensify.com from your favorite web browser.

After downloading the app, log into your new.expensify.com account (you’ll use the same login information as your Expensify Classic account). From there, you can customize your profile and start chatting immediately.

Start Chatting

Select New Chat to chat one-on-one or New Group to start a group chat.

Workspace Chat Rooms

In addition to 1:1 and group chat, members of a Workspace or Policy will have access to two additional rooms; the #announce and #admins rooms. All workspace members are added to the #announce room by default. The #announce room lets you share important company announcements and have conversations between workspace members.

All workspace admins can access the #admins room. Use the #admins room to collaborate with the other admins on your policy, and chat with your dedicated Expensify Onboarding Guide. If you have a subscription of 10 or more users, you’re automatically assigned an Account Manager. You can ask for help and collaborate with your Account Manager in this same #admins room. Anytime someone on your team, your dedicated setup specialist, or your dedicated account manager makes any changes to your Workspace settings, that update is logged in the #admins room.

How to format text

• To italicize your message, place an underscore on both sides of the text: text
• To bold your message, place an asterisk on both sides of the text: text
• To strikethrough your message, place a tilde on both sides of the text: text
• To turn your message into code, place a backtick on both sides of the text: text
• To turn your text into a blockquote, add an angled bracket (>) in front of the text:

  your text

• To turn your message into a heading, place a number sign (#) in front of the text:

  Heading

• To turn your entire message into code block, place three backticks on both sides of the text:

  here's some text 
  and even more text
  

FAQs

How do I add more than one person to a chat?

Start by clicking the green chat + button and select New Group. Search for the people you want to invite and check the circle to the far right. Once you’ve selected everyone you want in the group chat, click the Create Group button at the bottom of your screen.

Can I add people to an existing Group chat?

Adding people to an existing group chat isn’t possible right now, so you’ll want to make a new group chat instead.

Someone I don’t recognize is in my #admins room for my workspace; who is it?

After creating your workspace, you’ll have a dedicated Expensify specialist who will help you onboard and answer your questions. You can chat with them directly in the #admins room or request a call to talk to them over the phone. Later, once you’ve finished onboarding, if you have a subscription of 10 or more users, a dedicated Account Manager is added to your #admins room for ongoing product support.

Can I force a chat to stay at the top of the chats list?

You sure can! Click on the chat you want to keep at the top of the list, and then click the small pin icon. If you want to unpin a chat, just click the pin icon again.

Deep Dive

Chat display, aka Priority Mode

The way your chats display in the left-hand menu is customizable. We offer two different options; Most Recent mode and #focus mode.

• Most Recent mode will display all chats by default, sort them by the most recent, and keep your pinned chats at the top of the list.
• #focus mode will display only unread and pinned chats, and will sort them alphabetically. This setting is perfect for when you need to cut distractions and focus on a crucial project.

You can find your display mode by clicking on your User Icon > Preferences > Priority Mode.

Inviting someone to Expensify Chat

If the person you want to chat with doesn’t appear in your contact list, simply type their email or phone number to invite them to chat! From there, they will receive an email with instructions and a link to create an account.

Once they click the link, a new.expensify.com account is set up for them automatically (if they don’t have one already), and they can start chatting with you immediately!

Flagging content as offensive

In order to maintain a safe community for our users, Expensify provides tools to report offensive content and unwanted behavior in Expensify Chat. If you see a message (or attachment/image) from another user that you’d like our moderators to review, you can flag it by clicking the flag icon in the message context menu (on desktop) or holding down on the message and selecting “Flag as offensive” (on mobile).

Once the flag is selected, you will be asked to categorize the message (such as spam, bullying, and harassment). Select what you feel best represents the issue is with the content, and you’re done - the message will be sent off to our internal team for review.

Depending on the severity of the offense, messages can be hidden (with an option to reveal) or fully removed, and in extreme cases, the sender of the message can be temporarily or permanently blocked from posting.

You will receive a whisper from Concierge any time your content has been flagged, as well as when you have successfully flagged a piece of content.

Note: Any message sent in public chat rooms are automatically reviewed by an automated system looking for offensive content and sent to our moderators for final decisions if it is found.