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 .