Now

Before: where did that go?

At tax time, the question is simple — where did my money actually go? The old categories couldn't really answer it. Everything landed in one of fifteen broad buckets like "Office & Utilities" or the catch-all "Other Expenses," so a client lunch, a flight, and a new laptop could all end up looking the same.

Categories that match how you work

Now there's a thoughtful category for almost everything you spend on, grouped the way you'd actually think about it. Software and subscriptions sit together, travel and meals have their own spots, and bank fees stay separate from the money you move between accounts. Keep it simple or get specific — whatever keeps your books readable to you.

Cat does the filing

You shouldn't have to sort every transaction by hand. As new ones land from your bank, Cat drops each one into the right category — you just glance and confirm, or change it in a click. Correct it once and Cat remembers.

Taxes and totals that add up

The boring-but-important stuff is handled too. Tax payments like VAT and sales tax are recognized for what they are, so the right treatment is ready when you file. And moving money between your own accounts no longer shows up as spending — so when you (or your accountant) look at the totals, they reflect the real business.

Opening one thing used to close another

Side panels used to replace whatever you were already looking at. Worse, creating something mid-task — a new customer while building an invoice — popped open a separate window that closed your invoice underneath it. You'd finish, turn around, and your place was gone. For a tool you live in all day, that adds up to a lot of lost context.

Panels that stack

Now every panel stacks. Drill from an invoice into its customer, open a new project without leaving what you're doing, jump from a transaction to a linked receipt — each one opens on top of the last, and a breadcrumb at the top of the panel shows the exact trail you took.

Step back anytime

Click any step in the breadcrumb to jump straight there, or close the top panel to drop back to the one beneath it. Finish creating that customer and you land right back on the invoice with it already filled in — no retracing your steps. The browser back button works too, and your open panels survive a refresh.

Instant, even when you go deep

Panels load only when you actually open them, and quietly preload the moment you hover — so they appear the instant you click, no matter how much else is open. Going three panels deep feels exactly as fast as opening one.

Why we moved off Trigger.dev

We started on Trigger.dev because it let us ship background work without running our own infrastructure — a smart trade when we were small. As Expensicat grew, the operational overhead and the round-trip out to a cloud service on every single job became the slow part. So we built our own runners.

Self-hosted runners, always warm

Background jobs now run on our own queue — BullMQ on Redis — across machines that stay warm and scale up automatically when the backlog grows. There's no cold start and no hop out to a third party, so a job runs the moment it's queued. That's how exporting your inbox went from roughly 19 seconds down to about 1.5.

Faster across the board

This isn't only exports. Bank syncs, receipt and invoice imports from email, Gmail, and Outlook, recurring and scheduled invoices, document processing, and reconciliation all run on the same pipeline — so the work that used to make you wait now happens quietly in the background.

Keys that don't outlive the job

We tightened security on the way through. Instead of one long-lived key shared across every background task, each job now mints its own — tied to that single run, limited to exactly the permissions it needs, and expiring after five minutes. Even if one were ever intercepted, it would be useless almost immediately.

Free during the beta

While we're in beta, all of this is free — none of the pricing below takes effect yet. When the beta ends, we'll move every workspace into a 14-day trial automatically, so you get two weeks to explore the plans and pick the right one before anything is charged.

Pricing that follows your usage

Every plan now comes with a monthly allowance for the things that cost us to run for you — Cat's work and the documents we process. Stay within it and you pay nothing extra; go past it and you're only charged for what you actually used, counted to the document and the token. No tiers to jump, no paying for headroom you'll never touch.

Always know where you stand

A new usage dashboard in Settings → Billing shows how much of each allowance you've used this period and gives you a running estimate of the month's cost — your plan, your seats, and any usage beyond the allowance, added up. If you cross your included amount, it's flagged plainly, so the bill at renewal is never a surprise.

Start free, grow when you're ready

The Free plan is a real plan, not a countdown — a monthly allowance, no card required. When you outgrow it, Solo and Team start with a 14-day trial, and Team bills by seat with your first seats included, so your cost grows only as your team does.

Coming soon: bring your own meter

The same usage engine that meters Expensicat is built to work for your product, too. We're building toward letting you define your own meters, stream in your product's usage, and bill your own customers right on top of Expensicat — the foundation landed in this release, and the rest is on the way.

Matching That Learns From You

Every match you confirm or reject teaches Expensicat what's right for your team. A vendor now auto-matches on its own only after you've confirmed it enough times, so the matches that need a human eye stay in front of you and the wrong ones drop away. Suggestions weigh the name, amount, date, and currency together — and tune to your own history — for more accurate pairings the more you use them.

Close Calls, Surfaced — Not Guessed

When two transactions look almost equally likely, Expensicat no longer picks one and hopes. It puts both in front of you to choose. And when an amount and date line up perfectly but the name doesn't, a "Verify" flag appears so a lookalike charge can't quietly auto-match.

Stuck Receipts, Unstuck

If a receipt can't be processed, it used to sit in a never-ending loading state. Now it shows a clear error with a Retry button — one click reruns the whole pipeline, so a temporary hiccup is no longer a dead end.

Outlook, Meet Your Vault

Expensicat already pulls receipts and invoices from Gmail — now Outlook and Microsoft 365 inboxes do the same. Connect your account once and new documents flow straight into your inbox, ready to match and approve.

Sign In and You're Set

Connect securely with your Microsoft account and import runs quietly in the background — no forwarding rules, no manual uploads. Everything Gmail import does, Outlook now does too.

Right From Onboarding

New to Expensicat? Choose Outlook the moment you set up, so your vault starts filling from day one. Already onboarded? Add it anytime from Settings → Integrations.

Clear approvals from your dashboard

The new Review Queue widget brings inbox items awaiting a decision right to your homepage. See how many are waiting, preview the document on hover, and approve or reject inline — no trip to the approvals page. It's opt-in, so add it from Customize whenever you want it.

Search got sharper

Yesterday's command palette put every part of your workspace one keystroke away — now the results themselves are smarter. A typo or a missing accent won't hide the record you're after, and something close in meaning still surfaces even when the exact words don't match. Deleted inbox items stay out of your results, too.

A calmer chat with Cat

Conversations name themselves as you go, so your history is easy to scan later. And if a reply ever gets cut off, Cat shows a clear message with a Retry button instead of leaving you stuck on a blank bubble.

One place to find the work

Search now covers the parts of Expensicat people actually jump between all day: inbox items, transactions, invoices, credit notes, quotes, customers, entities, projects, documents, and time entries. Open it with Command-K, type a few letters, and go straight to the record you need.

It also knows where you are. If you're already on invoices, customers, transactions, entities, or another searchable page, Tab applies your search as a page filter instead of making you retype it in a separate field.

When search becomes a question

Not every search is really a search. Sometimes "vercel" means "show me the Vercel invoice"; sometimes it means "what do we spend on Vercel?"

When you want Cat instead of a result, press Command-Enter or choose Ask Cat from the palette. Cat gets the right bit of context — that the message came from search and which area you were searching — while your chat still shows only what you typed.

Fewer dead ends

The palette is tighter now: clearer empty states, better recent items, denser result rows, and shortcuts that behave like shortcuts without getting in the way of normal typing.

Your policy, in plain English

Tell Cat how you want expenses handled in a sentence or two — "auto-approve receipts under €100, route anything bigger to an admin." There's nothing to configure beyond writing it down, and you can drop in a sample receipt to see exactly how Cat would rule before you save.

Cat takes the first pass

Every receipt and bill that lands in your inbox is checked against your policy. The routine, in-policy ones are approved on their own; anything unusual — over your limit, missing a VAT ID, or simply ambiguous — is routed to an admin with the matching rule and a confidence score attached. You decide how far Cat goes: suggest only, one-click accept, or full auto-approve for high-confidence items.

Decide in a click, from anywhere

Approvals live in their own inbox queue, split into Awaiting and All. Approve, reject, or undo with a click or a keystroke — or act straight from the email notification without logging in. Whoever uploaded the receipt sees the result the instant you decide, and gets a heads-up by email and WhatsApp too.

One place to tell us where you're registered

If you sell across borders, the question of which VAT to charge depends on where you're registered, not just where you and your customer are. Until now you had to pick the right rate on every line yourself. Now you tell Expensicat once per legal entity, and the invoice editor does the rest.

Open your legal entity, add a registration, pick one of three schemes:

• Standard — a direct national VAT/GST registration in a country other than your home (the warehouse case)
• Union OSS — the EU single registration that covers cross-border B2C sales to every other EU member
• Import OSS — for low-value (under €150) B2C imports into the EU

You can have several. Each one has its own start date and an optional end date, so a registration you closed last year doesn't keep applying to invoices you issue today.

The rate picks itself

For every new invoice line, Expensicat looks at your home country, your active registrations, your buyer's country, and whether they gave you a valid EU VAT ID. From that it picks the right treatment:

• Selling at home → your domestic rate
• Selling to an EU business with a valid VAT ID → reverse charge with the right exemption code
• Selling B2C to another EU country with Union OSS on → the buyer's country rate
• Selling B2C to another EU country with no OSS → your domestic rate, with a hint to add Union OSS if you've crossed the €10k threshold
• Holding a direct registration in the buyer's country → that country's rate, ahead of OSS
• Selling outside the EU → export at 0%

Each line carries a short explanation of why it was taxed the way it was, so you can spot anything that looks off before you issue.

Per-line override is still one click

For the cases the engine can't know about — a goods seller who needs intra-Community supply (K) instead of the default reverse charge (AE), a B2C sale that's exempt for a specific reason — the tax picker on each line shows every available rate for the right country and date, with the EN 16931 exemption code attached automatically.