What Unusual Things Are You Using Xpenser For?
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.
Those are some fantastic ideas, but one thing I have been looking for, for a long time, is a way to track exercise. If you have Twitter integration, then I can say how much of each exercise I did when I finish each exercise at the gym.
Mileage tracking would be good too although less people need to record mileage than those using gyms, plus there already a very good online application for tracking mileage, it’s called “My Milemarker” and use Twitter as well.
I use it almost exclusively to track mileage. I’ve set up a report called “current expenses” that I call into using Jott. The miles are recorded in the amount. I transfer the expense to a monthly report and calculate by hand the mileage allowed by the IRS. .505 cents / per mile.
MyMileMarker seems to only give me gas mileage information. It doesn’t track miles that I can deduct for business expenses. So, I’d LOVE Xpenser to have a mileage feature that tracks by the odometer reading…I’d text or Jott something like: mileage, business, 75600 to Office Store. At the next stop I’d send: mileage, business, 75610 to home office. At the next stop I’d send: mileage, personal, 75630 to church.
In my business I go from my home office to various business places, then to lunch if I’m lucky, then maybe various places, then home, so I don’t do round trips very much….
Can’t wait for mileage tracker to be implemented. Hope it has an effective way to input all data: who, where, why, odometer readings and export to .xls. Thanks!
Also very interested in mileage tracker being added. I would love to send in something like “miles 36856 abc company client visit” and have it know this is the beginning of a trip. Since I put something after the mileage, log that as the purpose.
Then, if I just send in “miles 36900″ later, have it know this is the END of the last trip I started.
Thanks!
Robert, mileage tracking is now available. We’ll soon be putting together a blog post to announce and walk through it, but it’s fairly easy to figure out - go to the Keywords page ( http://xpenser.com/keywords/ ) to enable. Note that it doesn’t support start and end miles yet, but that’s fairly easy to add in a future release.