Expensify | Connecting to Oyster

With our Expensify integration, you can automatically sync approved expenses from Expensify with Oyster to reimburse them through our payroll. 

Ready? Let’s go!

Prerequisites

• For the integration to work, you must be on the “Control” Expensify plan. You also need to set up your policies correctly.
• Before setting up the integration, you need to make sure your policies are set up correctly. For more information about Expensify policy creation in general, see their forum post on the subject.

Steps in Expensify

1. Set report currency

Expensify reports need to be in the Team Member's currency, so you will need to create an Expensify policy for each currency in which Team Members are paid and assign those Team Members to the respective policies. You can find the report currency in the policy settings under the “Reports” option.

For example, if you have a Team Member in Great Britain and another in Ireland, you will need two Expensify policies. One will need the report currency as GBP and the other as EUR.

2. Require receipts

In order to process the expense reimbursement, Oyster requires a valid receipt image. To ensure that all expenses in Expensify have receipts, you will need to set a receipt threshold in your Expensify policies. To do this, go to the “Expenses” option of the policy settings, enable “Expense Violations” and set the “Receipt Required Amount” to 0. 

If an expense is created without a receipt image in Expensify, it will not sync to Oyster and you will get a notification in the “Alerts” section of your integration settings.

3. Check users are assigned to a policy

Once you have the policies configured correctly, make sure that every Oyster Team Member has been assigned to the correct policies in Expensify. You can see the users assigned to a policy in the “People” option of the policy settings.

4. Add users’ Oyster email addresses to Expensify

To match Team Members with their corresponding Expensify accounts, we use email addresses. If the email the Team Member has used in Oyster matches the email they use in Expensify, the integration will match the profiles automatically. However, if the email address used to set up the Oyster profile differs from the one used in Expensify, you will need to add the email used in Oyster to each user profile in Expensify.

You can do so from the “People” option of the policy settings. If you click on settings for a user, you will see the option to set Custom Fields. In one of the custom fields, you will need to enter the user’s email used on their Oyster profile in the following format:

oyster_email: <email address>

For example, if a user had the email of user@email.com on their Oyster profile and another_user@email.com on their Expensify profile, you would need to enter oyster_email: user@email.com  in one of the Custom Fields in Expensify (this is case sensitive). Make sure to verify the email addresses for all team members that will be submitting expenses via Expensify.

Note: We will only sync expense information for team members that match in Oyster. We do not pull any information for any non-Oyster team members that you may have in Expensify.

Steps in Oyster

Once you have set up your Expensify policies correctly, you are ready to set up the integration in Oyster. You will find the Expensify integration under “Available Integrations” in the Oyster app.

1. Enter Expensify API credentials

Start the integration setup and enter your Partner User ID and Partner User Secret. Important: Make sure you are logged in to your Expensify account as an admin when you do this. You can find these in your Expensify account in the following link https://www.expensify.com/tools/integrations/ 

2. Select policies to sync

You will then be taken to a screen showing the available policies you can connect. If you don’t see any policies, refresh the page and verify that you have correctly set up your Expensify policies. The list will show all available policies from Expensify, so choose the ones that are associated with an Oyster Team Member to enable the expense sync. You can always change these later in the integration settings.

Once you have completed the set up, you are all ready to start syncing expenses from Expensify! Expenses in the state “Final Approved” in Expensify will sync daily at 03:00 UTC, and will be reimbursed through Oyster's payroll each month after the cut-off date. 

Note - Once Team Members are matched as part of the integration setup, they will be blocked from submitting expenses via Oyster. They will only be able to view approved expenses synced from Expensify and any previously submitted expenses.