Summary
Management framed Q1 as a profitable transition, with migration and product performance determining whether encouraging adoption signals become durable growth.
What analysts pressed on
- 01Growth inflection: positive customer reactions and April membership supported confidence, but management offered no quantified inflection timeline.
- 02Migration progress: management did not confirm the analyst’s approximately 60% estimate, instead emphasizing controlled migration and customer feedback.
- 03Migration strategy: management plans to continue using product improvements rather than forcing Classic customers onto New Expensify.
- 04Platform performance: functionality is viewed as strong, but larger customers require faster and more reliable performance before migrating.
- 05Investment priorities: engineering is emphasizing performance hardening and requested features over large capital projects.
Notable disclosures
- Larger customers are reportedly eager to migrate, but management is delaying moves until performance improves sufficiently.
- Customer migration is controlled by Expensify, allowing management to preserve Classic while improving New Expensify.
- More than 30 product improvements shipped during Q1 across finance workflows, automation, controls, and collaboration.
- AI capabilities scheduled for June were cited as a potential additional adoption catalyst.
Risks raised
- Top-line and paid-member pressure remain unresolved despite improving April membership.
- New Expensify performance is not yet sufficient for larger customers, creating a migration bottleneck.
- The anticipated growth inflection depends on converting mostly anecdotal customer enthusiasm into measurable adoption.
- Management acknowledged the strategy requires a long investment period and will not produce results overnight.
Tone: Positive 0.55
Management sounded confident in product-market potential and cash generation, but acknowledged unresolved performance, migration, and growth execution challenges.
Who spoke
Company
- NikkiInvestor Relations
- Ryan SchafferChief Financial Officer
- David BarrettChief Executive Officer
Analysts
- Unidentified AnalystAnalyst
Full transcript
Analyst questions are marked with a bar. Timestamps are into the recording.
Prepared remarks
NikkiInvestor Relations
Hello, and thank you for joining us for Expensify's Q1 2026 earnings call. I'm going to start off with the legal disclosure and then hand off to Ryan Schaefer, our CFO, and David Barrett, our founder and CEO. Please note that 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 these 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 expected 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. And with that, I'll hand it over to Ryan.
Ryan SchafferChief Financial Officer
Thank you, Nikki, and thanks everyone for joining today's call. Let's start with the Q1 financials. Revenue for the quarter was $34 million, down 6% year-over-year. Average paid members were $632,000, down 4% year-over-year. Total interchange revenue was $5.5 million, up 10% year-over-year. While we continue to see pressure on the top line, we're really focused on the fundamentals of the business and focusing our efforts on returning to growth. Operating cash flow was $0.1 million, and free cash flow was $2.5 million. The difference in those numbers is largely driven by the timing of customer payments. Our gap net loss was $2.3 million. Our non-gap net income was $3.6 million, and adjusted EBITDA was $6.2 million. So while revenue has declined, profitability is still strong, and that's a key theme for the business right now.
As mentioned we generated million in free cash flow this quarter It worth noting that we also had a one legal payment of million related to the class action lawsuit we since settled Absent that payment we would have seen roughly million in free cash flow this quarter With that said we remain conservative in our outlook and are reiterating our full year 2026 free cash flow guidance of to million As always we like to provide a look into the performance of next quarter paid active member number For April 2026, we had 641,000 paid active members, which is an improvement from our Q1 average and what we think is an encouraging sign for the quarter. In conclusion, we are focusing on maintaining strong fundamentals in the business, investing in long-term growth opportunities, Migrating customers to new Expensify and iterating quickly on their feedback.
And with that, I'll hand it over to David for a product update.
David BarrettChief Executive Officer
Thanks, Ryan. I think the simplest way to frame Q1 is this. We're building a more durable, more profitable business today while setting ourselves up for a much stronger growth story tomorrow. The numbers show the transition, but the product tells you where we're going and how far we've actually come. In Q1, we made meaningful progress in both distribution and product adoption. A major focus was accelerating our bring-your-own-cards strategy. Historically, companies often had to change cards to get the full value of expense automation. With BYOC, they can keep the corporate cards they already have, connect them to Expensify, and automatically import transactions as expenses. That removes a major adoption barrier and lets us meet customers where they already are.
We also expanded our partnership footprint. We renewed our referral program with ANZ, added KiwiBank, and partnered with the Institute of Commercial Payments, giving us stronger visibility across the banking and commercial payments ecosystem. At the same time, we broaden the commercial ecosystem around Expensify with new ERP relationships with Campfire and ReLit, plus a travel integration with American Airlines. The goal is simple, make Expensify fit naturally into the systems businesses already use. On the product side, Q1 was a strong shipping quarter, with more than 30 improvements across the app. In January, we focused on practical finance workflows, better top-spending visibility, receipt rotation, automatic approval routing, old card assignment, bank account sharing, clearer card status labels, and Uber for business discounts.
In February, we launched a new HomeTab, upgraded Insights, made concierge available in more places, and added merchant and itemized receipt rules. These are important because they move Expensify from simply capturing expenses to actively helping users manage spend, automate coding, and resolve issues faster. In March, we continued that momentum with account-related client workspaces, GPS mileage tracking, expanded Insights charts, stronger virtual card controls, mobile receipt cropping, faster report creation, bulk expense selection, inline editing, CSE member imports, and smarter HomeTab alerts. Taken together, these updates make new Expensify faster, more automated, and more useful for both individual employees and finance teams. Stepping back, Q1 is about strengthening the foundation while setting up the next phase of growth. The Expensify card continued to perform well, with interchange revenue growing to $5.5 million, up 10% year-over-year.
We also continue to generate cash, producing positive operating cash flow and $2.5 million of free cash flow in the quarter. At the same time, we're seeing encouraging growth signals. April paid active users increased to above Q1 average of Combined with product velocity you just saw the expansion of BYOC and major AI capabilities coming in June we believe the business is positioned for a potential inflection point So our focus remains consistent Keep improving new Expensify reduce adoption friction expand distribution and turn the product momentum we seeing into durable growth With that thank you to everyone for joining Let hop into our Q Perfect.
Questions and answers
Mark, I believe you're on the line if you want to open us up for the Q&A.
Unidentified AnalystAnalyst
Hi, can you hear me okay? Yeah. Thanks for taking my question here. Dave, just a question on a comment. You're prepared to mark. She mentioned that you believe that the business was poised for an inflection point. I was wondering if you could just dig into that a little bit more.
David BarrettChief Executive Officer
Sure. I mean, I think that this isn't a new thing. We've been talking for a long time. The whole strategy behind New Expensify is to shift away from kind of a more traditional expense management solution towards a more modern, collaborative, AI-focused solution. And so we knew this was going to be a huge investment. We knew it was going to take a long time. And we were at the tail end of that. So, you know, we've been migrating users over, and I think we're just extremely pleased with the reaction we're getting from traditionally classic customers moving to new Expensify, seeing the new capabilities, the AI, the collaboration, all that. And so I think on one hand, it's just a lot of kind of mostly anecdotal but really positive evidence coming from customers migrating over.
We're also just seeing the excitement from new customers, kind of what we refer to as new native customers, customers who've never seen Expensify Classic. They're just coming to the product, and they really just get it, and they like it, and they really value it. And so it's validated a lot of our design decisions, and I think we feel really confident in that.
And then, of course, there's just kind of the green shoot indicators, like April was pretty good from a paid member growth perspective, as we saw. And so again, a lot of this is nothing new. This is the story we've been telling for a very long time. But the story has always involved basically making a kind of, you know, difficult but big swing on what we think is still a massive, massive opportunity out there. Like when I think of it, you know, there's nothing that fundamentally has changed about the market in the sense that I still think there's something like 100 to 1,000 times more opportunity out there than this traditional opportunity has ever seen. New, expensive eyes designs to go out and get it.
I think we're more and more confident that we can. It's not going to happen overnight, but, you know, we're a long-term business. We've always said that, and I think we just feel very, you know, excited and had a lot of conviction in that long-term strategy.
Unidentified AnalystAnalyst
Great thanks And then as a follow maybe if you could just update us on the percentage of your classic customers that have migrated to the new platform I think it's about 60%, I would say.
David BarrettChief Executive Officer
The main thing, migration is going well. The nice thing about migration is we control the timelines of it, and we are migrating customers over and then paying very close attention to any feedback they have. I would say the most important feedback we have is simply just performance. The functionality is great. And it's reliable, but it's just not fast enough for the larger customers. And so we never want to migrate over a customer that we're not confident is going to have a great experience. And so we're, I'd say just in general, a lot of our engineering has shifted away from big sort of capital projects and more towards just rapidly integrating with the specific features that customers request, responding to feedback and so forth.
And so right now, I would say a big thrust of our engineering is simply on hardening and improving the performance of our existing functionality in Nail.
Unidentified AnalystAnalyst
And then along with that, you know, to date, your migration strategy for the new Expensify platform has relied mainly on carrots rather than sticks. And, you know, with about 60% migration so far, do you plan to shift that approach to move the rust over?
David BarrettChief Executive Officer
I mean, I don't think so. I think the carrots work pretty well. They've been working well for us. And again, we have the ability to maintain classic. And so we don't, we're not backed into a corner in a sense like we don't have to push people over. We do it because we think we can give them a better experience. And so there's no reason to, I guess, threaten anyone. It's, we want to pull them over with honey rather than vinegar. Is that how that saying goes? And so I think that we've got plenty of time to do that. I think we have plenty of good opportunity or super exciting functionality to pull them over.
In fact, I would say one of the challenges is we have larger customers that want to come over and we're like, look, I know the functionality is really powerful. I know that it does all this new stuff, but the performance just isn't there yet. And so I would say kind of we're experiencing a bit of the opposite problem where we have enthusiasm to come over, and it's just not quite there from a performance perspective. And so that's where a lot of our attention is at.
Unidentified AnalystAnalyst
Great. That's helpful. Thank you. That's all for me.
David BarrettChief Executive Officer
Great. Just got confirmation that we were double booked, so we will speak to our other analysts offline. That's everyone we have live on the call right now. Great. Well, thank you, everyone, for dialing in. It's definitely an exciting time for us. I think we're super excited about where this is going, and so appreciate your time. Thank you.
Other Expensify earnings calls
- Q2 2026 earnings call
Management framed Q2 as evidence that New Expensify is gaining traction while Classic funds the transition, despite unresolved cohort timing.
Aug 06, 2026Positive0.40 - Q4 2025 earnings call
Management framed 2025 as an execution year, with migration nearly complete and AI, travel, cards, and product-led growth driving the next phase.
Feb 26, 2026Positive0.68
Done reading? Open Expensify with the chart, filings, and estimates next to this call.
About this transcript
The summary, guidance, analyst focus, and tone are automated and should be checked against the call before being relied on. Names and figures can be misheard. Listen to the replay.