One of the most frequent and long standing requests has been to add a command to Xpenser for retrieving the balance of your reports. Well, Brandon Krauska’s email was the one that put it over the edge – instead of adding another vote to the prioritization queue, we jumped in and implemented it.

It’s simple to use: just send the keyword “balance” or “bal” to Xpenser using email, IM, SMS, etc, and you’ll see a response with your latest balance. You can also combine this with your report keywords to get the balance for a specific report. For example, if you create a report called “Personal Expenses, July 2010″ and assign the keyword “personal” to it, then the command:

balance personal

would return the balance of that particular report.

Give it a try, let us know what you think, and keep the feedback coming: feedback@xpenser.com . You never know, your email might be the one that makes a feature happen!

Photo by Foxtongue.

Quick note: we’ve launched an improvement to the PDF output of expense reports – the sizing should now be more reasonable and consistent (no more giant headers), the header contains a little more information, and overall it’s slightly cleaner.

Take a look and let us know what you think, and thanks everyone who provided feedback on the existing report format.

As always, please keep the feedback coming ( feedback@xpenser.com ). You never know, your input might me the one that tips things over in favor of implementing/improving what you’re looking for.

AndBot is a great new Android application directory with lots of news and reviews and a very good search feature. This morning they have a wonderful review of the Xpenser Android application with lots of screenshots and a good overview of how a “satisfied, long time user of Xpenser” has been making use of it. Go give it a look, and thanks AndBot!

Here’s a brief video of how to use the Fresh Xpense iPhone application to record expenses and receipts into Xpenser.

Fresh Xpense is free, very simple to use, and supports offline data entry – you can record your expenses even if you don’t have internet access, and they will be sync’d to xpenser.com the next time you are connected.

By user request, here’s a quick video of how to use your camera phone to record expenses and receipts. The video shows an iPhone, but the same technique can be used with any camera phone with email capabilities:

• First, take a picture of your receipt
• Then, email that picture to r@xpenser.com
• Use the subject of the email to describe the expense – for example, “Parking $8″

It’s easy to specify the expense date when submitting to Xpenser – just use the “date” keyword, followed by the date of the expense in any reasonable format. Any of these will work:

• taxi $18 yesterday – you don’t need the “date” keyword if it’s just yesterday
• taxi 18 date last wed – you can generally specify dates in any reasonable way. “last wed”, “next monday”, etc, all work.
• taxi 18 date 4/19/2010 – you can specify the date as an actual date. In US format only at the moment (month/day/year), leave us a comment saying hello from your country to remind us to get moving on international support
• taxi 18 San Jose airport to hotel date last wed – you can include any notes (”San Jose airport to hotel” in this case) as usual after the amount, before the date

A little while ago we released the Xpenser API and Platform, opening the door for third parties to build new and interesting applications on top of Xpenser, provide new applications and interfaces, and integrate Xpenser into their own products. The Xpenser Android application is one of the applications been built using these APIs by REI Computer Consulting.

An Android app for Xpenser has been one of your top requests for some time, and now thanks to the folks at REI Computer Consulting, it is available!

The Android application is quite capable – it not only allows you to record new expenses, but also lets you view your previous expenses and reports, and provides both a quick add and a detailed add capability. We’ve been using it for a few weeks now and have been quite impressed.

So give it a try and let us know what you think by emailing android@xpenser.com . And here’s the QR code for easy download:

We love our users, for they inventive and resourceful. Here’s a nice invention from Ryan Straight of Teach Video Games that allows you record your expenses by pressing just a few keys on windows (and possibly under linux as well). It was inspired by the LifeHacker post on adding items to Remember The Milk (another excellent app that you should look at, by the way).

Here’s how to set it up:

• Make sure you have Launchy installed.
• Download the script from here. Copy it to your Launchy plugins folder, typically “C:\Program Files\Launchy\plugins“
• Open it in your favorite text editor and update the “GMAIL USERNAME” and “GMAIL PASSWORD” fields to your gmail username and password.

• Setup the Launchy Xpenser command by hitting Alt+Space, and click the gear icon at the top right of the popup.
• Click on Plugins tab, then click on “Runner” in the list of items on the left.
• Hit the Plus icon near the bottom of the screen and add the following:
  • name: xpn
  • program: C:\Program Files\Launchy\plugins\xpn.vbs
  • arguments: “$$” (include the quotes)

You should now be ready to go. To use it:

• Hot Alt+Space to get launchy to pop up.
• Type in “xpn”, then hit tag. You should see a right arrow/triangle pop up after the “xpn”. Now type in your expense as usual – for example, “lunch 45.11 with Joe”. Hit enter.

And that’s it! Your expense will be sent over to Xpenser and recorded without breaking your workflow or even requiring you to open up your browser.

Thanks Ryan and LifeHacker!

As always, please let us know of any feedback, suggestions, neat tricks, or inventions at feedback@xpenser.com .

Thanks to the wonderful folks at Zia Consulting, we have our first Xpenser iPhone application, called Fresh Xpense.

Fresh Xpense has been built using our brand spanking new Xpenser Platform APIs, also available now. More apps for more platforms are coming soon, and feel free to jump in and build you own.

Fresh Xpense is wonderfully easy to use and supports offline mode – you can enter expenses even when you’re not connected to the web and they will be synchronized the next time you get online.

Give it a try, and don’t forget to rate it. And as always, feedback is very much appreciated and welcome: iphone@xpenser.com .

Some of you may be familiar with YubNub, which bills itself as a “social command line for the web”. The idea is to provide a simple command line like interface to allow you to performs all kinds of interesting actions by simply typing them in. We, being geeks, are quite familiar with it, so we were thrilled to find out Nathan Rein (@nbr) has created an Xpenser command for Yubnub:

http://yubnub.org/kernel/man?args=xpns

Thanks Nathan, yet another beautifully simple way to interact with Xpenser!