Xpenser Blog » HowTo

Xpenser Overview and Tutorial From a User

Spencer — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 17:19:07 +0000

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!

Even Easier OS X Expense Tracking With Xpenser

Spencer — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 19:33:41 +0000

The illustrious Bindu Wavell (creator of the Fresh Xpense Capture iPhone app) has come up with another fantastic little helper: an OS X app that allows very simple expense capture, with voice response.

I’d love to see a hotkey for this to make it even easier; if anyone wants to contribute one drop us an email ( feedback@xpenser.com ) or leave a comment here.

We love the Xpenser community, you guys are the best. Contributions are welcome as always; see our extensive APIs for how to interact with Xpenser.

Xpenser on iPhone: Fresh Xpense Capture Screencast

Spencer — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 19:27:36 +0000

Fresh Xpense Capture is a lovely iPhone application for capturing expenses and receipts and storing them in Xpenser. Bindu created a very nice screencast showing how to use it, which we’ve embedded below. Take a look, and as always feedback is most welcome as comments here or as email to feedback@xpenser.com (or iphone@xpenser.com for iPhone specific feedback).

Also, be sure to follow FreshXpense on twitter for announcements and updates. And of course you can follow @xpn for general Xpenser news and announcements as well.

How To Get Your Report Balances: The “Balance” keyword

Spencer — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:38:54 +0000

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.

Using The Fresh Xpense iPhone Application With Xpenser

Spencer — Tue, 18 May 2010 19:37:36 +0000

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.

Using Your Camera Phone To Record Expenses And Receipts: A Tutorial

Spencer — Tue, 18 May 2010 19:11:55 +0000

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″

How To Specify Expense Dates For Xpenser

Spencer — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 17:54:50 +0000

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

Xpenser Windows Hotkey via Launchy

Spencer — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 18:50:12 +0000

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 .

A Yubnub Social Command-Line Xpenser Plugin

Spencer — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:11:55 +0000

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!

Command Line Tool For Easy Expense Entry

Spencer — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:30:44 +0000

David Douglas has whipped up a nice little shell script that allows command line entry of expenses into Xpenser. For you Mac and Unix command line warriors, take a look at his Expense Tool Done Right post for details.