The iPhone interface for Xpenser is starting to look pretty good. If you’re an Xpenser user with an iPhone and want to test (or to get a sneak peak) let us know at feedback@xpenser.com and we’ll send you instructions.

We like a lot of what 37 Signals have to say. If you’re in the software or design business give their writings a good look.

One of their recurring themes is keeping things simple and knowing when to say no to features. We were discussing this recently when an interesting topic came up: what about the existing features?

We’ve done some analysis and found that the majority of our users aren’t aware of the majority of features Xpenser offers. Which is odd in some ways, given the relatively few features we’ve exposed.

There’s a very good argument to be made for putting time and effort into making the existing features more obvious, more accessible, and more usable, instead of introducing new features. We’ve attempted to keep the features in the product flexible so you can use them in a variety of ways; in fact we’re continually surprised by the innovative ways you use and combine features to solve problems. This is the mark of a good feature. We’d create more value for more people by making these building blocks better known.

We’re not going to stop introducing new features; we have a fairly clear set of things we want to implement to make Xpenser more useful. However, we will be going back and looking at how to make the existing features and capabilities more discoverable and easier to use. And as always, we’d love to hear your take on it. Drop us a comment below or let us know at feedback@xpenser.com.

We get lots of interesting email about unusual uses for Xpenser. We’ll be publishing some of them on the blog here for your enjoyment. If you have a story you’d like to share send it our way (feedback@xpenser.com), along with your name, URL, etc, if you’d like those published.

Cheryl writes:

You’d asked about unusual uses for Xpenser, here’s mine.

Keeping track of my auto maintenance records had always been a pain. I wanted to know how much I was spending on the cars, as well as when and where I’d performed maintenance on them, but my system of throwing the receipts in the glove box wasn’t working very well.

Xpenser to the rescue: I created a report for each of our cars, “Lexus” and “Honda”, and set up a keyword for each, “lexus” and “honda”. Now each time I get service done I record it with the following format:

Oil change 24.83 EZ Lube 54,881 lexus

Major Service 508.31 Plainlands Honda 63,221 all fluids

The type of service is the first item, followed by the cost, the place it was serviced, and the mileage at the time of service.

Note: Cheryl is using the file-to-report feature to send each entry to its designated report; see this screencast for how you can do the same.

This way I not only know how much I’m spending, I also know exactly what service was performed where and when.

I’ve also experimented with keeping track of my gasoline costs in the same reports, but ended up creating separate reports since the gas entries were much more frequent than the service entries, making them harder to find.

Photo by VirtualErn

We’ve just launched support for Google Talk / XMPP / Jabber, allowing you to submit your expenses from even more places and devices.

To enable, go to the Account page, click the IM option in the “Setup” menu bar, and enter your Google Talk / Jabber address:

Enjoy, and happy fathers day!

We’ve had quite a few requests to allow SMS confirmation replies (the familiar “Got it!…”) to be turned off, so we’ve added an option to do just that. Note that we’ll soon be making the replies more informative, so you might regret turning them off, but if you really want to, go the Account page and look for the “SMS expense confirmation reply” option in the SMS box:

Often you’ll need a way to keep track of separate groups of expenses, say for different clients or for separating your personal and business expenses. The file-to-report option provides an easy way to do this.

The screencast below walks you through it. In short, create a separate report for each client or category, say “BigCo Client” and “SmallCo Client”, assign a keyword to each report, say “bigco” and “smallco”, and include those keywords in the expenses you submit. For example, the expense “taxi 67 smallco” would get filed in the “SmallCo Client” report.

You may have noticed over the last few weeks we’ve been releasing various pieces of functionality that all add up to lots of new features and new ways to use Xpenser.

The core of the release is the ability to define actions based on keywords you include in your expenses. For example, if you include the word “mileage” in your report we’ll treat it as a mileage tracking entry and automatically convert your entry from miles to dollars (or km to euros, etc). This is a general capability that will allow us to offer new features more quickly and more flexibly.

From the Keywords page you can enable the following:

• Deposit / Starting Balance: You can now indicate deposits or other positive amounts by including a “+” in front of your entry, or by including the keyword “deposit”. For example, “paycheck +2000 june”, or “cash 100 deposit larry paid me back”.
• File To Report: One of the most common feature requests has been a way to track different types of expenses separately - for example, you may have multiple clients you bill expenses to, or you may want to keep your business and personal expenses separate. File-to-report enables this: create a separate report for each type of expense (or client, etc), and assign a keyword to each. For example, say you have 2 clients, Big Company Inc. and SmallCo LLC. Create a report for each, say “Big Company June” and “SmallCo June”, and assign a keyword to each, say “bigco” and “smallco”. You can use these keywords to indicate which report expenses should be routed to. Eg. “flight 569.13 san jose to chicago bigco” would route your expense to the “Big Company June” report, and “supplies 34.65 smallco” would route to “SmallCo June”.
• Mileage Tracking: Another frequently requested feature, this allows you to set your preferred conversion rate (say $0.505, the 2008 IRS standard rate), and automatically convert your miles to currency. Include the keywords “miles” or “mileage” in your expense - eg. “customer visit 95 miles” would get converted to “customer visit 47.98 (95.0 miles at 0.505)”
• Currency Conversion: This one’s for you globe trotting adventurers out there. If you spend money in foreign currencies, enable currency conversion and include the currency in your expense - eg. “taxi 40 eur airport to hotel”. We’ll use the International Monetary Fund published exchange rates to automatically convert to dollars. This release assumes your base currency is dollars; we’ll add support for other base currencies in an upcoming release.

All of these work from all interfaces (Web, IM, SMS, Twitter, etc). Give them a try and let us know what you think.

And as always, let us know what features you want us to support next. Leave a comment here or send us email at feedback@xpenser.com .

Apparently our habit of answering support emails at all hours of day and night have led to an interesting guessing game as to which country we’re based in. We’re based in sunny San Diego, California, in the good old U.S. of A.

We’re a startup, so sometimes we work around the clock. If you get a response at 3am Pacific it’s because one of us is still up at 3am, so please excuse the incoherence and spelling in advance…

We’ve heard from quite a few of you about the unusual and interesting uses you’ve found for Xpenser. Fantastic! If you’ve got a clever use for Xpenser leave a comment here or write us (feedback@xpenser.com) and let us know. Don’t be shy; we’d like to do what we can to accommodate the things you want to do.

Some of the things you’ve been doing:

• Tracking diet and calories. Create a report called “diet” and record what you eat. Eg. “burger 325 island’s”, where 325 is the number of calories.
• Tracking mileage. This will be supported soon, but people are already doing it manually. Update: mileage tracking is now available via the Keywords page.
• Tracking exercise and fitness. People have been keeping track of their exercise regiment. Eg. “running 6 miles”, “weights 45 minutes”.
• Tracking time. Eg. “contract review 0.75 client X”.
• Tracking tasks and bugs. This is an unusual one, but a few of you are doing some sort of project management… We don’t quite get this one, but feel free to enlighten us.
• General notes. Some people are using Xpenser to record general notes and reminders on the run.

Let us know if you’re doing these or other things, and if you’re interested let us know which ones we should provide better support for.

Your privacy is very important to us. We actually mean it when we say that; we’re all big users of Xpenser ourselves, so it’s our own privacy we’re protecting when we protect yours.

Take a look at our Privacy Policy and let us know of any feedback you might have.