The good folks at NetBanker have written a nice piece on Xpenser titled Xpenser Masters Mobile Expense Input, complete with screenshots, commentary and a nice overview of the various input mechanisms. Good stuff, but this sentence had us laughing out loud: “That feature is so clever, it’s almost creepy”. I think we’re going to take this as our motto – we aim to be so clever we’re creepy.

The feature they’re talking about, by the way, is recording expenses via the browser search box. They’re right, that is clever

Which reminds me – we have a FireFox plugin we coded up specially for Paul Kedrosky quite a while back and distributed to him and a few friends, but never quite got around to releasing widely. It lets you enter expenses from FireFox by hitting a hotkey. Better looking and less creepy than the search box option. If there’s interest we’ll release it.

The article didn’t mention some of the other features – mileage tracking, automated currency conversion, file-to-report, and the recently added time tracking. We have to do a better job of making those obvious.

Happy Xpensing, and as always please let us know what your top requests are. Yes, a real human will answer your email, and yes, we actually really do care. Leave a comment here or email feedback@xpenser.com .

Now back to being creepy.

As you may know we’ve run into a Twitter limit on how many accounts we can allow into Xpenser. Asking nicely worked, and you helped spread the word and get about 500 new users following Xpenser. Thank you!

However, we’re still shy of the 2000 user mark, so we figured we would try good old fashioned bribery: we’re giving away an iPod Shuffle to one of the Twitter users that is following us when we hit the 2500 user mark.

To be eligible, you must follow the xpn user using your Twitter account. If you already follow xpn you are already eligible.

Since we’re not sure what the legal issues around doing contests outside the US are, you must be a US resident in order to be eligible, and we can only ship to US addresses. If someone points us at clear instructions that show expanding this outside the US is easy (we know there are a lot of attorneys using Xpenser, now is the time to speak!), we may expand it to other countries.

Please read the rules and legal notices, and spread the word, let your friends know they should follow xpn.

By popular demand, we are happy to bring you time tracking from any device using Xpenser. 

Many of you suggested it would be great to track time using all of the interfaces Xpenser supports. As Linda put it “Would you please add time tracking so I can keep all my billable items in the same place?”. Several of you wanted time tracking via IM, others wanted SMS, Twitter, etc.

With tonight’s release you can track time with the same ease you’re used to, either by noting the amount of time spent or by using start and end timers, from all of the interfaces Xpenser supports – Email, SMS, iPhone, Jott, Dial2Do, IM (Yahoo, MSN, AIM, GTalk), Twitter, and the Web.

You can define your hourly billable rate, your billing time increment, and your rounding method (closest, always round up, or always round down), and let Xpenser become your personal time assistant.

From the Keywords page, enable Time Tracking:

Set your paramters as desired:

Now any expenses you submit that start with the word “time” will trigger the time tracking feature. Here are some examples:

• time 15 min phone call
• time 1:30 contract review
• time 3.5 on-site with client X
• time 90 minutes design

You can express the time in minutes or hours, using the words minutes, mins, hours, hrs, or hr. Note that as always if you are using SMS you must include “exp” in front of your submission.

You can also use start and stop timers to measure time spent. At the start of your task, submit the expense “time start”. You can also include notes for this time – e.g. “time start contract review”.

Once you are done, submit the expense “time stop”. Xpenser will calculate how much time you spent on the task, converting your “time start” and “time stop” to a single “Time” entry using the rounding increment and rules you defined.

So there you have it, hopefully as simple as the rest of Xpenser. We received good feedback from your during the development process (particularly the attorneys, consultants, and freelancers), but we know there’s always plenty of room for improvement, so let us know what you think, what you like and don’t like, and what else you’d like to see added.

And as always, send your feature requests to feedback@xpenser.com . We generally prioritize implementation by user requests, so don’t be shy about putting in your vote.