Xpenser Blog

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

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 FilesLaunchyplugins“
• 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 FilesLaunchypluginsxpn.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 .

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!

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.

We get lots of interesting email about unusual uses for Xpenser. We’ll be publishing some of them on the blog here for your enjoyment. If you have a story you’d like to share send it our way (feedback@xpenser.com), along with your name, URL, etc, if you’d like those published.

Cheryl writes:

You’d asked about unusual uses for Xpenser, here’s mine.

Keeping track of my auto maintenance records had always been a pain. I wanted to know how much I was spending on the cars, as well as when and where I’d performed maintenance on them, but my system of throwing the receipts in the glove box wasn’t working very well.

Xpenser to the rescue: I created a report for each of our cars, “Lexus” and “Honda”, and set up a keyword for each, “lexus” and “honda”. Now each time I get service done I record it with the following format:

Oil change 24.83 EZ Lube 54,881 lexus

Major Service 508.31 Plainlands Honda 63,221 all fluids

The type of service is the first item, followed by the cost, the place it was serviced, and the mileage at the time of service.

Note: Cheryl is using the file-to-report feature to send each entry to its designated report; see this screencast for how you can do the same.

This way I not only know how much I’m spending, I also know exactly what service was performed where and when.

I’ve also experimented with keeping track of my gasoline costs in the same reports, but ended up creating separate reports since the gas entries were much more frequent than the service entries, making them harder to find.

Photo by VirtualErn

We’ve just launched support for Google Talk / XMPP / Jabber, allowing you to submit your expenses from even more places and devices.

To enable, go to the Account page, click the IM option in the “Setup” menu bar, and enter your Google Talk / Jabber address:

Enjoy, and happy fathers day!

We’ve had quite a few requests to allow SMS confirmation replies (the familiar “Got it!…”) to be turned off, so we’ve added an option to do just that. Note that we’ll soon be making the replies more informative, so you might regret turning them off, but if you really want to, go the Account page and look for the “SMS expense confirmation reply” option in the SMS box:

Often you’ll need a way to keep track of separate groups of expenses, say for different clients or for separating your personal and business expenses. The file-to-report option provides an easy way to do this.

The screencast below walks you through it. In short, create a separate report for each client or category, say “BigCo Client” and “SmallCo Client”, assign a keyword to each report, say “bigco” and “smallco”, and include those keywords in the expenses you submit. For example, the expense “taxi 67 smallco” would get filed in the “SmallCo Client” report.