The good folks at NetBanker have written a nice piece on Xpenser titled Xpenser Masters Mobile Expense Input, complete with screenshots, commentary and a nice overview of the various input mechanisms. Good stuff, but this sentence had us laughing out loud: “That feature is so clever, it’s almost creepy”. I think we’re going to take this as our motto - we aim to be so clever we’re creepy.

The feature they’re talking about, by the way, is recording expenses via the browser search box. They’re right, that is clever

Which reminds me - we have a FireFox plugin we coded up specially for Paul Kedrosky quite a while back and distributed to him and a few friends, but never quite got around to releasing widely. It lets you enter expenses from FireFox by hitting a hotkey. Better looking and less creepy than the search box option. If there’s interest we’ll release it.

The article didn’t mention some of the other features - mileage tracking, automated currency conversion, file-to-report, and the recently added time tracking. We have to do a better job of making those obvious.

Happy Xpensing, and as always please let us know what your top requests are. Yes, a real human will answer your email, and yes, we actually really do care. Leave a comment here or email feedback@xpenser.com .

Now back to being creepy.

As you may know we’ve run into a Twitter limit on how many accounts we can allow into Xpenser. Asking nicely worked, and you helped spread the word and get about 500 new users following Xpenser. Thank you!

However, we’re still shy of the 2000 user mark, so we figured we would try good old fashioned bribery: we’re giving away an iPod Shuffle to one of the Twitter users that is following us when we hit the 2500 user mark.

To be eligible, you must follow the xpn user using your Twitter account. If you already follow xpn you are already eligible.

Since we’re not sure what the legal issues around doing contests outside the US are, you must be a US resident in order to be eligible, and we can only ship to US addresses. If someone points us at clear instructions that show expanding this outside the US is easy (we know there are a lot of attorneys using Xpenser, now is the time to speak!), we may expand it to other countries.

Please read the rules and legal notices, and spread the word, let your friends know they should follow xpn.

By popular demand, we are happy to bring you time tracking from any device using Xpenser. 

Many of you suggested it would be great to track time using all of the interfaces Xpenser supports. As Linda put it “Would you please add time tracking so I can keep all my billable items in the same place?”. Several of you wanted time tracking via IM, others wanted SMS, Twitter, etc.

With tonight’s release you can track time with the same ease you’re used to, either by noting the amount of time spent or by using start and end timers, from all of the interfaces Xpenser supports - Email, SMS, iPhone, Jott, Dial2Do, IM (Yahoo, MSN, AIM, GTalk), Twitter, and the Web.

You can define your hourly billable rate, your billing time increment, and your rounding method (closest, always round up, or always round down), and let Xpenser become your personal time assistant.

From the Keywords page, enable Time Tracking:

Set your paramters as desired:

Now any expenses you submit that start with the word “time” will trigger the time tracking feature. Here are some examples:

• time 15 min phone call
• time 1:30 contract review
• time 3.5 on-site with client X
• time 90 minutes design

You can express the time in minutes or hours, using the words minutes, mins, hours, hrs, or hr. Note that as always if you are using SMS you must include “exp” in front of your submission.

You can also use start and stop timers to measure time spent. At the start of your task, submit the expense “time start”. You can also include notes for this time - e.g. “time start contract review”.

Once you are done, submit the expense “time stop”. Xpenser will calculate how much time you spent on the task, converting your “time start” and “time stop” to a single “Time” entry using the rounding increment and rules you defined.

So there you have it, hopefully as simple as the rest of Xpenser. We received good feedback from your during the development process (particularly the attorneys, consultants, and freelancers), but we know there’s always plenty of room for improvement, so let us know what you think, what you like and don’t like, and what else you’d like to see added.

And as always, send your feature requests to feedback@xpenser.com . We generally prioritize implementation by user requests, so don’t be shy about putting in your vote.

Well folks, it seems we’re popular on the internets. It turns out we’ve hit the 2000 follower limit on Twitter and can’t add any more accounts, as you’ve probably noticed if you tried to register a new twitter account with Xpenser in the last day or so.

We’re working with the Twitter folks to fix this. In the meanwhile, our sincere apologies. We’ll get your Twitter fix back on as soon as we can.

As a few of you pointed out the new IRS default rate for mileage is 55 cents per mile. As of this morning we’ve updated the default rate on Xpenser to match.

Please note that you can setup your own rate via the Keywords page - the default rate comes into play only if you haven’t defined your own rate.

The good folks at Fring, the mobile app that allows you to make free calls and connect on Skype, Yahoo IM, MSN, ICQ, AIM, Twitter, and a whole bunch of other services, have added support for Xpenser. Thank you Fringers!

I’m particularly happy to see this as I’ve been a Fring user for some time. I first downloaded it on the iPhone before the app store even existed, and I continue to use it as my mobile IM. 

If you have a mobile device, try Fring. If you don’t have a mobile device, get one!

Thanks to your continued feedback we continue to add features you like. The latest currency to be added: Hong Kong Dollar (HKD).

As always, keep the feedback coming - we may be able to make it happen quickly.

The new date format has elicited a lot of reaction, summed up succinctly by Andrew Portez: “Did I mention that I hate it?”

You did, as did quite a few others.

The source of the displeasure was the fact the longer date string caused the expense to take two lines where before it only took one.

We’ve reduced the length of the date string by getting rid of the day-of-week: “Tues 1 Jan 2009″ is now “1 Jan 2009″. We should be back to a single line for a single expense.

Please make sure you reload the page by holding down the shift key and hitting reload the next time you visit the Expenses page. 

By the way, early testing group, thank you so much for catching this before we launched the last release…

We’ve just added support for Argentine Pesos (ARS) and Romanian New Leu (RON) to currency conversion, please give it a try and let us know if you run into any trouble.