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April 2026 Updates

April
2026

April was about speed and surface area. Expensicat got faster where it matters most — receipts back in seconds — and grew a brand new way to use it: the terminal. Two interfaces, same backend, same data. Here's what shipped.

Instant Receipts

The headline feature. Send Cat a receipt and your expense comes back before you've put your phone down.

  • No queue, no spinner — amount, vendor, date, line items extracted the moment a receipt lands
  • Same speed everywhere — WhatsApp, the app, MCP, CLI — one backend, one experience
  • Files live in your conversation — drop a PDF, an image, a spreadsheet, then ask Cat follow-up questions about it
  • Pick up where you left off — close the tab mid-conversation, come back tomorrow, your chat is exactly where you left it

We rebuilt the receipt pipeline from the ground up to do everything inline. Whether you're in Berlin sending a dinner receipt over WhatsApp or in your terminal piping a PDF to Cat, the result is the same — and it's there immediately.

Expensicat CLI

You can now run your entire business from a terminal. The CLI ships as a single command and covers the same ground as the dashboard.

  • One command to install — npx @expensicat/cli and you're ready
  • Browser-confirmed login — no API keys to manage, no tokens to rotate
  • Everything you'd do in the app — list transactions, create invoices, track time, connect banks, check metrics
  • Tab completion for bash, zsh, and fish — discover commands as you type
  • Works on macOS, Linux, and Windows — same binary, same behaviour

We didn't build a CLI as a checkbox. We built it so AI coding assistants like Claude Code and Cursor can drive Expensicat directly — clean structured output when piped, friendly tables when you're at a terminal. If you've ever wanted to script "log my hours and invoice the client" in three lines, you can now.

If you're curious about the design choices behind it, we wrote up the ten things that separate good CLIs from bad ones.

Smarter Cat

Cat got noticeably more capable this month, on top of the file and persistence work above.

  • Complex results open in a side panel — invoices, reports, big tables no longer flood your chat
  • MCP connections are faster and more reliable — Claude Desktop, Cursor, and other clients reconnect cleanly and stay connected
  • Real-time updates are more stable under heavy usage — long sessions and busy workspaces no longer drop events

Everything Else

A few more things that landed in April:

  • Hundreds of fixes across receipts, matching, and bank sync
  • Faster page loads in the dashboard, especially on the transactions and invoices views
  • Tightened up MCP tool descriptions so AI clients pick the right tool more often

Coming in May: E-Invoicing

If you invoice in Europe, this one's for you.

The EU is standardising electronic invoicing on EN 16931 — a single semantic data model that every member state agrees on. It's already mandatory for B2G across the EU, and B2B mandates are rolling out fast: France, Germany, Belgium, and Poland all have hard deadlines on the horizon. The short version: PDFs are out, structured XML (UBL or CII) is in, and your invoices need to be machine-readable by tax authorities and your customers' accounting systems.

We're shipping native EN 16931 support in May. Generate compliant e-invoices, send them over PEPPOL, and stay ahead of every mandate without changing how you work — Expensicat handles the format, you keep designing invoices the way you always have.

More on that next month. Until then, enjoy the speed.