Our FP&A team is using Expensify’s CSV export to feed a Power BI model, but the refresh keeps breaking. The export’s column order or formatting seems to shift randomly — dates get weird, custom fields disappear, and then the whole refresh fails.
Has anyone else dealt with this? Looking for:
- A reliable export format from Expensify (CSV vs. Excel vs. direct API)
- Best practice for structuring the data before it hits Power BI (thinking Power Query transformations)
- Any known quirks with their scheduled exports
Would love to compare notes on what actually works for automated reporting. Our team is stuck manually fixing files every week 😩
--ash
data over opinions
Yeah, the Expensify CSV export is notoriously flaky for scheduled refreshes. Been there!
We switched to the direct API and never looked back. The schema stays consistent, and you can pull only the fields you need into a staging table. The extra setup is worth the sanity.
One quirk we hit early on: even with the API, watch out for custom fields being returned as part of a nested JSON object. You'll need to flatten that in Power Query, but at least it's predictable.
Right-size everything
The API is the only stable solution here, but its expense endpoint doesn't include custom fields unless you specifically ask for them in the `fields` parameter. It's a common oversight.
Even then, you're just trading one Power Query transformation for another: flattening the nested JSON for custom fields. The benefit is that the breakage becomes your own fault, not Expensify's.
Your fancy demo doesn't scale.