Spend Trends gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at the year’s most popular merchants, fastest-growing expenses, major fluctuations across industries, and more.
Expensify, the world’s most popular preaccounting platform, published its annual Spend Trends report today, which investigates how business expenses shifted over the course of 2020.
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In the first quarter of the year, business travel services such as Uber, Lyft, Marriott, and Hilton held their usual spots among the top 10 most popular expenses. The airline industry, however, was absent from the list and already starting to show signs of decline. From February through March, airline receipt volume plummeted more than 60%.
At the start of the second quarter in April, the COVID-19 pandemic continued its disruption of the global economy and kicked off a massive shift in business spend. Many companies refocused on financing healthier remote environments for their employees, as working from home became the norm.
In terms of pandemic success stories, the explosive growth of Zoom in Q2 and beyond is worth highlighting among other companies that skyrocketed in 2020 due to the demand for apps that help facilitate remote work. Also of note are food delivery apps, which surged at a breakneck pace into Q3 and now teeter on 300% receipt growth from 2019.
By Q4, airline and hotel receipts had already started trending positively again, but they had since been replaced by newcomers to the list of most popular expenses. Those newcomers were FedEx and USPS, who crept into the top 10 after months of growth in home deliveries. By year end, it was crystal clear that workers had fully embraced the WFH lifestyle and settled into their remote routines more than ever.
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