…to revive the Xpenser blog! We’re back! We apologize for the absence and hope to get the conversation started once again.

Quite frankly, we’ve been busy keeping up with the tremendous growth we saw over the past year (thanks to all of you for spreading the word!), adding new features (most recently: Project Based Accounting, more to come on that in the next post), and working on our support website filled with screenshots and screencasts (help.xpenser.com for a sneak preview — official launch coming soon).

We’re excited for what this new year brings and have several new features in mind. But as you know, we love hearing from our customers. What are some features you hope to see this year?

Go ahead and comment below or shoot us an email at feedback@xpenser.com.

Happy new year everyone !

There was a subtle bug introduced in version 1.2 build 45 of Fresh Xpense Capture, the Xpenser iPhone app, that would cause expenses and receipts to not synchronize from the iPhone to the Xpenser website for some users. For the technically inclined, it was related to a thread locking bug on our part during report synchronization.

Bindu quickly resolved the issue and the fine folks at Apple expedited the review to get the new version in the app store, so please be sure to upgrade to the latest version (build 46).

If you have receipts or expenses stuck on the iPhone, please do the following before upgrading to build 46:

If you’re using iOS 3.x, simply close the app, then restart it.

If you’re using iOS 4.x:

• Open up the Fresh Xpense app
• Press and hold the power button until the “slide to power off” message is displayed
• Release the power button, then press the home button until Fresh Xpense quits

Then you should be able to restart Fresh Xpense and the receipts and expenses should start uploading. If it gets stuck again, you’ll need to restart it again using the above instructions.

You folks are wonderful. We love your emails and feedback, your extensions for Xpenser (by the way, here’s new one for creating recurring expenses for Xpenser: http://rexpenser.com/), your tweets, and your writeups and blog posts.

Here’s a particularly brilliant post from Deborah Chang, a middle school science teacher in Houston, TX, called “Keeping Track of Your Finances: The Easy Way“. Complete with screenshots, it provides a detailed overview of how she uses Xpenser to track her travel expenses for a conference, and includes a nice overview of how tags can be used.

Thank you Deborah for your great writeup!

Quick note: Quicken (QIF) export now includes categories (thanks Chuck for pushing us to make it happen), just in time for tax preparation.

Note that Categories are part of the premium version of Xpenser (Xpenser for Business), so if you’d like to use them let us know to convert your account (self-service upgrade of accounts will be available soon).

Not long ago by popular request we added confirmation replies for items submitted via email. Xpenserites everywhere rejoiced and tears of joy flowed.

As with any good feature, there were also interesting side effects. In particular, our confirmation replies and your “out of office” replies decided to see who could out-do the other: you’d send in an email, we’d reply with a confirmation, your robot would reply with an “out of office”, we’d respond to that, and so forth.

We are now very cleverly avoiding this by looking for common “out of office” replies and ignoring them. We will be employing fancy artificial intelligence techniques to this in the future, but in the meanwhile we wanted to cover non-English responses as well.

So: how do you say “Out of office” in your language? If there’s a standard “Out of office” reply people typically setup in your language please either leave it in a comment below or email us at feedback@xpenser.com so we can add it to the ignore list.

We’ve had a long standing request to have tags copied along with expenses when copying between reports. Just today Buford requested this, and his request was the one that put it over the edge and caused us to fix it (thanks Buford).

Copying of expenses now also copies their tags. Go forth and merrily copy all over the place.

If you have a feature you want to see implemented let us know at feedback@xpenser.com ; we love to hear it and your request might just be the one to make it happen.

As you might know we’ve long supported response messages for SMS expenses: when you send us an expense via SMS, we respond with an SMS letting you know we received it and telling you the report balance.

Well, we’ve long gotten requests to respond to email submissions in the same way: to send an acknowledgement reply that includes the report balance.

The last request finally did it (thanks Uri!) and we turned on responses for email submissions. Now each time you submit an expense via email you’ll get a response so you can be sure we got it and processed it.

This means, by the way, that you can now check the balance on your reports by sending an email with the subject “balance” to e@xpenser.com .

We hope you like it. I’m sure you’ll let us know if you don’t It’s feedback@xpenser.com as always.

Xpenser for Business, the business version of our product that provides a comprehensive expense management solution for your company, supports the concept of Categories, defined company-wide, as well as the free-form Type supported in the basic version.

We’ve updated the CSV export format to support this new field, so in addition to the existing fields you’re used to seeing you should now also see a “category” field. The exported fields are:

"id","date","type","category","amount","notes","tags","rawamount"

We now have quite a few companies and non-profits enjoying Xpenser for Business. If you’d like to get your hands on it before it’s widely available later this year please drop us a line at feedback@xpenser.com and we’ll get you setup with a trial account.

By popular request we’ve enhanced the Excel export capabilities to support the international date format – you should now see day/month/year style dates if you’ve set your date display style to international via the Account Settings page.

In response to several requests and email conversations we’ve put together a quick Python wrapper for the Xpenser APIs – or more specifically, just the expense API a the moment. This should provide a nice example of how to interact with Xpenser from Python, and will grow over time.

The code is on github, so for the technically inclined please feel free to improve and update. And if you have wrappers or examples in other languages please let us know so we can include pointers to them in the developer documentation.