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May 2026 Updates

May
2026

We promised e-invoicing in May. We shipped it — and then some. This was the month Expensicat grew into something you can run a real, cross-border business on: compliant invoices, a tax engine that handles the messy reality of selling across borders, and an AI that knows when to ask before money moves. Here's everything that landed.

E-Invoicing — Delivered

Last month we said European e-invoicing was coming. It's here.

  • EN 16931, the format every EU tax authority agrees on — generate compliant e-invoices without ever thinking about XML
  • Factur-X, UBL, and CII out of the box — a human-readable PDF with the machine-readable data baked right in
  • Download the structured file, ready to file — hand your customer's accounting system or a tax authority the exact format it expects
  • SEPA QR codes on every invoice — your customer scans, their banking app pre-fills, they pay
  • Quotes and credit notes too — the whole document family is compliant, localized, and audit-ready
  • PDFs in nine languages — English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Czech, and Polish
  • A compliance ledger that locks issued invoices — once it's out the door it can't be quietly edited, so your audit trail always holds up

We also put a free e-invoice validator on the site — drop in any UBL or CII file and check it against the EN 16931 rules, whether or not you use Expensicat.

A Real Tax Engine

Selling across borders means VAT gets complicated fast. Now Expensicat does the hard part for you.

  • VAT calculated automatically on every invoice and quote, the moment you create it
  • One Stop Shop (OSS), Non-Union OSS, and IOSS — the cross-border VAT schemes, handled
  • Reverse charge for B2B — sell to a VAT-registered business abroad and the right note appears on its own
  • Threshold tracking — we watch your distance-selling totals and tell you before you cross the €10,000 line, not after
  • Tax registrations — record your VAT numbers per country and Expensicat applies the right rules for each

You design the invoice. Expensicat figures out the tax.

Approvals That Think

Your money shouldn't move without you — but you also shouldn't have to eyeball every coffee receipt. So we taught Cat your spend policy.

  • Write the rules in plain English — "client dinners over €100 need sign-off," "no alcohol," whatever your business actually runs on
  • Cat reads every receipt against your policy and either clears it, flags it, or routes it to a human
  • Routine, in-policy expenses clear themselves — only the exceptions land on your desk
  • Approve in one click, straight from email — no login, no dashboard hunt
  • Every decision is reviewable and reversible — Cat shows its reasoning, you stay in control

It's the principle we keep coming back to: AI handles the routine, humans handle the exceptions.

A Developer Platform

Expensicat is now something other tools can build on.

  • API keys you manage yourself — create, scope, and revoke them right from Settings
  • Provider-ready invoice APIs — create invoices programmatically, with idempotency built in so a retry never doubles up
  • Invoice numbering, your way — set the prefix, year format, sequence, and reset schedule per template, with a live preview
  • Structured payment details on every PDF — beneficiary, IBAN, BIC, reference, and amount, laid out cleanly above the SEPA QR

Sharper Search

Search got a serious upgrade, and it now works the same way everywhere.

  • One engine across everything — inbox, invoices, quotes, transactions, customers, projects, and tasks all rank results consistently
  • It understands meaning, not just keywords — search "printer ink" and find the Amazon order
  • Typos and accents don't matter — "eckero" finds "Eckerö"
  • Exact matches rise to the top, every time

Everything Else

A busy month under the hood, too:

  • A new integrations catalog — browse everything Expensicat connects to, from banks to AI assistants, with real brand logos
  • Rewritten privacy, terms, and cookie policies — honest about exactly who touches your data, plus a consent banner that respects Global Privacy Control automatically
  • New DPA, Acceptable Use, Accessibility, and Security pages — the paperwork serious businesses need before they sign on
  • CLI 0.3 and 0.4 — more commands, faster, smoother
  • Cleaner bank feeds — pending transactions no longer clutter your view until they actually settle
  • The usual hundreds of fixes across invoicing, matching, and sync

Coming in June

May was about getting invoices right. June is a big one — the other half of the loop comes into focus: getting paid, reconciling it, and giving everyone the right view of the work.

The marquee: reconciliation that gets it right. We're rebuilding the engine that matches your bank transactions to your invoices and receipts from the ground up — one that learns from your corrections, stops guessing when it isn't sure, and nails the obvious matches every single time. Fewer suggestions, more certainty.

And a lot more landing alongside it:

  • A customer portal — give clients their own password-protected space to see your company details, their invoices, and exactly where each one stands. Stripe's hosted portal, but yours.
  • Command Search — one palette (⌘K) to find anything in your workspace: inbox items, transactions, invoices, customers, projects, time entries, and more. Filter the page you're already on with Tab, or hand the query to Cat with ⌘↵ when a lookup is really a question.
  • Smarter approvals — attach an approved inbox item or transaction straight to an invoice you're about to send, so the proof travels with the document.
  • Finer-grained access — hide bank transactions from team members while keeping them in full view for admins and your accountant. Your books, your boundaries.
  • Plaid — connect thousands more banks, with deep coverage across North America.
  • Outlook sync — connect your Outlook inbox and let invoices and receipts flow in automatically, just like the rest of your email.

More on all of it next month. For now — go invoice the world.