Expensify - Earnings Call - Q1 2025

Executive Summary

• Q1 2025 revenue grew 8% year over year to $36.1M, while non-GAAP EPS was $0.053 vs S&P Global consensus $0.064; revenue modestly missed Street by ~$0.3M and EPS missed by ~$0.011 as higher taxes and ongoing SBC weighed on results. Values marked with * are from S&P Global.
• Adjusted EBITDA was $8.4M and free cash flow was $9.1M (+75% y/y), driven by 43% y/y growth in Expensify Card interchange to $5.1M and strong adoption of Travel; paid members declined 5% y/y to 657k.
• Management raised FY 2025 free cash flow guidance to $17.0–$21.0M from $16.0–$20.0M, citing confidence but a conservative posture amid macro/tariff uncertainty; April paid members were ~flat at 655k.
• Near-term catalysts include the June 25 F1 movie sponsorship (front-loaded GAAP S&M expense recognition with limited incremental cash impact), simplified pricing for Collect ($5/member/month), and expanding Concierge AI capabilities to voice and conversational corrections.

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• Interchange growth: Expensify Card interchange reached $5.1M (+43% y/y), supporting revenue diversification beyond subscriptions.
• Travel adoption: Quarterly travel bookings rose 166% q/q; management notes customers are adopting Travel at twice the rate of the card at launch.
• Cash generation and guidance raise: Free cash flow was $9.1M (+75% y/y), prompting an FY25 FCF guidance increase to $17.0–$21.0M; “we think this is a conservative number” amid tariff-related uncertainty.
• Quote: “Q1'25 was another strong quarter... we are increasing our full year 2025 FCF guidance to $17.0 million - $21.0 million” – Founder & CEO David Barrett.

What Went Wrong

• Paid members decline: Paid members were 657k (−5% y/y), and April was slightly down (~0.5%), reflecting continued SMB caution and macro headwinds.
• Street misses: Revenue of $36.1M modestly missed S&P Global consensus of $36.41M*; Primary EPS (normalized) of $0.053 missed $0.0643* (tax expense up y/y to $2.0M vs $1.0M). Values retrieved from S&P Global.
• Elevated stock-based compensation (SBC): Total SBC expense was $8.0M in Q1, contributing to GAAP net loss of $(3.2)M, and GAAP S&M expense will spike in Q2 on F1 sponsorship accounting recognition.

Transcript

Niki Wallroth (Senior Project Manager)

All the information presented on today's call is unaudited, and during the course of this call, management may make forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These statements are based on management's current expectations and beliefs and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements in the earnings release that we issued today, along with the comments on this call, are made only as of today and will not be updated as actual events unfold. Please refer to today's press release and our filings with the SEC for a detailed discussion of the risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in any forward-looking statements made today. Please also note that on today's call, management will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures.

While we believe these non-GAAP financial measures provide useful information for investors, the presentation of this information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for the financial information presented in accordance with GAAP. Please refer to today's press release or the investor presentation for a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most comparable GAAP measures.

Ryan Schaffer (CFO)

Thanks, Niki. Now let's talk about the Q1 2025 financials. Our revenue was $36.1 million, which is up 8% year on year. Our average paid members were 657,000, which is down 5% year on year. Our total interchange was 5.1%, which is up 43% year on year. Our operating cash flow was $4.8 million. Our free cash flow was $9.1 million. The difference between those two numbers, again, is customer funds. Our GAAP net loss was $3.2 million. Our non-GAAP net income was $4.8 million, and our adjusted EBITDA was $8.4 million. Now let's talk about free cash flow. Obviously, we had a really good quarter free cash flow-wise. Like I just said, our Q1 free cash flow was $9.1 million, which is a 75% increase year on year and an increase of 45% quarter on quarter.

With our Q4 results, we initiated free cash flow guidance of annual free cash flow guidance of $16 million-$20 million. We are increasing that to $17 million-$21 million. That's a bit of a conservative increase. This is due to the kind of tumultuous nature of the economy right now as we watch the impact of the tariffs on the economy. Again, we think this is a conservative number. We have confidence we can hit this number, and we will update this as we see kind of how the current economic policy plays out. As always, here's our flash April paid members. April paid members were 655,000, which is just slightly down from Q1. It's less than 0.5% down, so essentially flat. April is usually a little soft, and this April is no different.

You can see previous April's denoted by the pink lines on the graph. Now let's talk about Q1 business highlights. Like I mentioned before, the Expensify Card grew to $5.1 million, which is a 43% increase year on year. Expensify Travel continues to grow very quickly. We saw a 166% quarter-over-quarter increase in quarterly travel in Q1. Notably, we are seeing customers adopt travel at twice the rate that they adopted the Expensify Card. We compare those two because it's a cross-sell from our traditional expense product, but we're seeing travel adoption be met by customers with a lot of enthusiasm, and we're very excited about it. Also, we announced full Spanish support, so if you speak Spanish, the product will look great to you. We have Spanish in our product UI and our product messaging, and also we're now doing sales demos and customer support in Spanish.

We are also adding more international support in more languages coming very soon. You might have also seen we announced a simplified pricing for our Collect plan. Our legacy Collect pricing, which is the same scheme that the Control pricing is still under, the Collect legacy pricing was $5-$20 per active member per month, and we gave a 50% discount for annual commitment or subscription and a 50% discount for Expensify Card adoption. Notably, no cost if you have employees who are inactive. Now, this is great for a more sophisticated customer that can forecast what their usage is going to be in the product. If you have, let's say, 100 employees, about 33% of them will be active on the platform any given month, but not the same 33%. So a different mix of employees each month.

In that case, the customer would buy a 33-seat subscription, and any employee can kind of sit in those seats. However, that did take me a while to explain, and it is more sophisticated. We saw that kind of falling flat on the lower end of the market. The collect customers generally self-service, and they're not talking to a salesperson. We need to communicate what our pricing is in under five seconds, very simply. This pricing is not a price reduction per se. It is more of a streamlining of our pricing, and that's based on extensive research into watching user sessions, talking to customers, and sales feedback. Under the new scheme, it's $5 for any member per month. You just enter how many employees you want to use the product at any time, and it's multiply that times $5, and that's your monthly price.

There's no annual commitment or card required, but they are billed whether or not the user is actually active. You're paying per account versus per active seat. The result is Collect is $5 per month per member, simplified pricing for simple customers, and Control, which is $9-$36 per month per active employee, which is advanced pricing for advanced customers. We think this is going to help us convert at the lower end of the market, and we're really excited for it. Now I'm going to pass it over to David.

David Barrett (CEO)

Great. Last quarter, we talked a ton about AI and all of the cool things that we're doing with it. This quarter is basically just saying we did a bunch of that. Last, we talked about this idea of conversational corrections, meaning that when you scan a receipt to create an expense, we use AI to figure out what the most likely category is based upon the type of merchant, what that merchant's name is, what the category names are, and so forth, as well as everything you've done, everything else your coworkers have done with a merchant in the past. We will either automatically categorize it, or we will suggest the most likely categories. Based upon that suggestion, you can either say like meals or whatever, or you can just respond in natural language of what you want done.

Our AI will basically do the right thing with that, what a human would do in that situation now will do. We talked about that aspirationally last quarter, and now that's done. That's in product, and you can use it today. It's very cool, and it's just a great, powerful feature to bring AI in to just solve these kind of mundane problems. Similarly, a feature that we've talked about for a while is this idea of more advanced policy violations where you can prohibit tobacco, gambling, alcohol expenses, and things like this. Now we do kind of deep receipt analysis to figure out what actually is being purchased, not merely where did you go, and you can deny those. Likewise, one thing we talked about is the power of AI for fraud reduction.

Anyone who's basically doing anything online, selling a product, booking travel, things like this, there's always some degree of fraud that you're trying to control, especially when it comes to just trying to understand on a per-travel basis what they're actually doing to make sure they're actually not booking any sketchy things, to make sure that no one's account got taken over or whatever it might be. Wide variety of ways things can go wrong. However, we can control for that, and we can basically detect and cancel this fraud travel in real time. All of this is basically stuff that we've talked about and stuff that we're bringing to market, and a lot of it's to market right now. Looking forward, I would say the stuff we're the most excited for is this idea that we talked about in the past.

We kind of call it virtual CFO functionality. Imagine if you had a CFO and they sat down with you to kind of optimize your workflow. They would say things like, "Why are you cutting a bunch of physical checks? Let's actually streamline that with direct deposit." Or even asking questions, saying like, "Who are my top spenders? Who spends the most out of policy?" You should just be able to ask Concierge that and just get the answer directly. Likewise, on a monthly basis, a CFO would tell you what's changed week on week, month on month, things like this. That is just going to be built out of the box. You basically have this ability to just get analysis pushed to you automatically without thinking about it. AI is getting great.

AI is heating up, but also the prep for F1 is really heating up. We're getting super excited about just the amount of visibility and traction that we're seeing in the lead-up to F1. Just to give one new thing that just happened. Doja Cat, my personal favorite, just launched this music video, and it's wild. Like the first 20 seconds of this music video are just slowly zooming in on the Expensify name. You got to watch the video. It's fantastic. It's not exactly safe for work, but it's still great. At the Met Gala, Dams in Industries walked out, first drove up in an Expensify branded F1 car, which no one's talking about that, which also is kind of amazing, and then walked into the Met wearing an Expensify basically racing outfit.

It was dramatically torn off, and he has a sweet suit underneath it. Basically, the part that I care about is he walked into the Met Gala wearing the Expensify branding while driving up in the Expensify car. This is just the kind of thing happening right now, and it's wild. It really has an effect. We saw actually for the hours after this particular thing happened, signups quadrupled basically from this one small action that just happened automatically that we didn't even plan for. There is all kinds of stuff like this happening every day around this, and the movie hasn't even launched. We're pretty excited about this F1 promo. It's going to be lining up to be one of the best product placements ever. It's pretty cool. We're excited.

Also, overall, I think we're excited that users are really starting to notice just how cool this design is. Here's just an actual user who just posted a review unprompted to G2 Crowd talking about how great Expensify Chat is. Because we've talked about sort of the challenge with expense management is you can automate like 80% of it, but that remaining 20%, the human interaction, that's where all your pain is. Chat-centric design is what streamlines that sort of last 20% by bringing it in product. You can just talk to your accountant, your employees, whoever it might be in the context of the thing you have a question on.

You're not texting them to say like, "Hey, remember that thing you did two months ago?" and they're going to be like, "What are you talking about?" Rather, you're saying, "On this particular expense, what's it for?" and then you can fix it right in the context of that, especially when Concierge is there. If you say what the fix is, the Concierge can just apply it right away. The design's really coming together. It's super exciting. I think the summer, in my mind, is really lining up to be kind of new Expensified V1. It's a very complete vision of what we set out to do years ago. I would say it's even better than we imagined. It's a pretty exciting time overall. That's all we got for now, and you can hear your questions.

Niki Wallroth (Senior Project Manager)

Thank you, David. One quick note, due to the amount of earnings calls happening today, we had a few scheduling conflicts with our analysts. If we don't hear from you on the Q&A, we look forward to speaking with you in the one-on-one callbacks. First, let's start off with Citi. I believe, George, you're here.

Hey, David, Ryan, Nicky, how are you all?

Ryan Schaffer (CFO)

Hey, George.

Great. Maybe we can just start with the topic of the day, macro and tariff impacts. You guys talked about kind of conservatively baking that into your guide to some extent. Have you seen any impacts to date? Maybe when you just think about your business, macro headwinds have been an issue in the recent past. You guys have made some changes to the business. How do you just think about your resiliency in the face of this environment?

Great question. I specifically like your question about resiliency. I think obviously no one wants a bad economy. That's not good for anyone. If we're going into kind of rough economic waters, I think that we are well positioned. Obviously, we had $9 million in free cash flow this year. I think that the way we've kind of restructured the business over the last year or two, we're in a really good place to weather a tough economic environment. That is, I mean, we're hoping for the best, preparing for the worst.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. That makes perfect sense. I wanted to also ask about the paid user number and really just kind of the disconnect that started to show up between what you've seen on revenue versus paid users. I mean, revenue up 8% year over year, paid users down year over year. When you guys think about your business, I think investors like we have been kind of trained on paid users as one of the most important metrics for the business. Now you guys are becoming multi-product. I mean, is that still how you guys are thinking about the business internally and kind of optimizing for paid users? Because it seems like there's levers here that are driving success that kind of extend beyond that metric.

Maybe you could just talk about what you've seen in that metric and then how you think about the business as one of many levers.

Yes. No, great question. Obviously, paid members is really important. That hasn't changed. That's a huge focus for us. We have diversified kind of our revenue streams over the last couple of years. It's not, I think around the time we IPOed, revenue and paid members were kind of in lockstep. We've diversified kind of beyond that, right? We can make money in other ways other than subscription. I think that paid members is still very important, but we have other tools in our toolbox to increase revenue, which is good.

Okay. Great. Maybe if I could just sneak one more in on the Formula 1. I think exciting times here. I think we're at T minus a month and a half or so away. You guys talked about maybe some early impacts. Do you feel like it had an impact in Q1, or do you think of this more as like a Q2 benefit? Presumably, the bulk of the benefit is going to be felt kind of in Q3 and beyond, or how are you guys thinking about kind of sequencing of how this hits the model?

I mean, I don't think we've seen much benefit in Q1. I think it's definitely going to pick up. Obviously, we're just kind of seeing the almost like pre-promotion type of impact. I mean, to answer your question, we think the impact is going to increase over time and probably more in Q3 than Q2 because, I mean, it takes time. You see the movie, okay, then you go to the website, you get into kind of our conversion funnel. In terms of like web traffic and stuff, obviously, we expect a lot around Q2. In terms of that representing a new business, we wouldn't see that until a little bit after.

I agree with that. Okay. Great. Thanks for taking the questions here.

Great questions, George.

Niki Wallroth (Senior Project Manager)

Great. Next, we have Citizens JMP. Aaron, I believe you're on the line.

Yeah. Thanks, guys.

Ryan Schaffer (CFO)

Hey, Aaron.

How's it going?

It's good to see you.

Always. Can you talk about what verticals, following up on George a little bit? What verticals are your customer base most exposed to today? I think you've become less reliant on tech customers since the IPO. Any analysis you've done on what percentage of your customer base is in industries that may face tariff headwinds?

David Barrett (CEO)

Great question.

Ryan Schaffer (CFO)

It's been a little challenging to track that because are the tariffs going to happen? What industries are they affecting? Does it get pulled back? I think that's been kind of tough to get an exact answer. I mean, kind of the behavior we're seeing is customers kind of in a wait-and-see type of.

David Barrett (CEO)

Of caution.

Ryan Schaffer (CFO)

Like holding pattern type thing. Obviously, in a healthy economy, our customers are growing, right? SMB customers grow faster than enterprise customers generally because they're smaller. I think our customers are kind of just waiting, right? They're not hiring a whole bunch of people. They're not doing big expenditures. They're trying to see how this shakes out and how it impacts them and all that. In Q1, I think it's kind of too early to really see that impact. It's something we're definitely monitoring, but it's tough to kind of pin down to a single number.

David Barrett (CEO)

Yeah. It's like everyone's just kind of holding their breath to see what's coming down the pipeline. I mean, I think we're as eager to find out as everyone else.

Got it. And then a second one. I'm looking at the slides right now. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you usually share the paid member numbers for the first month of the next quarter.

Ryan Schaffer (CFO)

Yeah.

Are the April numbers in here?

Yeah. Yeah.

David Barrett (CEO)

They are.

Ryan Schaffer (CFO)

Yeah. It was flat. It was slightly down flat, less than 1%, like less than half a percent.

Got it. The last one would just be, can you remind us from an accounting perspective with the F1 movie coming out in Q2, how we should think about how that's going to hit the cash flow statement and the income statement?

Yes. Great question, Aaron. The movie accounting is interesting, just as a review. We have been making payments for the movie for a while. The free cash flow impact of that has largely already been felt. However, we have not recognized the expense yet. The day the movie comes out, we will recognize the expense of all the payments we have made over multiple years. A large expense is being recognized, but not necessarily a large cash flow impact. We do have one more payment. There are some free cash flow. We are doing advertising next quarter. Next quarter is going to be an expensive quarter. It will impact free cash flow, but the S&M expense will be substantially higher because we are recognizing all the past payments that have already been recognized in free cash flow.

Great. Thank you, guys.

Thank you.

David Barrett (CEO)

Of course.

Niki Wallroth (Senior Project Manager)

Great. With the competing schedules, that's everybody we have live. We will speak to the rest of you all offline.

David Barrett (CEO)

All right. Short and sweet.

Ryan Schaffer (CFO)

All right. Thank you all, and we'll see you next quarter. Go see the movie.

David Barrett (CEO)

Yes.

Ryan Schaffer (CFO)

See the movie.

David Barrett (CEO)

June 25th. We'll see you there.

Ryan Schaffer (CFO)

All right. Thank you.