Thanks to your continued feedback we continue to add features you like. The latest currency to be added: Hong Kong Dollar (HKD).

As always, keep the feedback coming – we may be able to make it happen quickly.

We’ve just added support for Argentine Pesos (ARS) and Romanian New Leu (RON) to currency conversion, please give it a try and let us know if you run into any trouble.

Our first release of 2009, nicknamed “The Continental”, is here, bringing with it some long awaited love for our international users as well as a couple of other nice features for everyone.

Non-USD Base Currency. Surprised to find this was the top user requested feature, we consulted a map and confirmed that indeed there are a few countries outside of the United States, and most of them have their own currencies and languages. Who knew.

Xpenser now allows you to set non-US base currencies via the Keywords page. Go to the Currency Conversion panel, select your currency from the drop-down list, and enjoy automated conversion no matter where you spend your money.

Internationalized Dates. Turns out many countries also order dates differently. In the spirit international unity we decided to accommodate this strange habit as well. 

After some debate, experimentation, and user testing we settled on using an internationally understandable date instead of forcing you to declare your date preference upfront. The expense page now uses the format “Tues 20 Jan 2009″, which hopefully should be clear to everyone. You can set your date format preference for export of expenses via the Account Settings page:

New and improved Reports Page. As many of you had noticed the Reports page would start to get unwieldy and inefficient once you had more than a few reports. This one took a fair bit of experimentation as well, but we’re hoping the new layout, arranged by report status, will go a long way towards making it smoother and more efficient. Gone are the colorful icons and the fat boxes, replaced with text and a skinnier, more space efficient layout. We hope you like; otherwise let us know at feedback@xpenser.com .

AND for Tag search, Tags in export. Tags have been a big hit and you’ve been making great use of them. Almost as soon as we released them you requested the ability to search for expenses with all of the specified tags instead of any of the tags. Now you can: from the Expense page click the search button, and look for the “Tagged with Any of / All of” drop down at the top of the tag column:

You also wanted your tags included in your exports. They now are – select Export to CSV and you’ll see the extra tags column.

There are also various other improvements and fixes here and there, including improvements to the date detection algorithm in Import, allowing a wider range of date formats to work.

P.S. We’ve also added kilometres to mileage tracking – now you can use km, kilometers, or kilometres in your expense submissions – eg:

driving 87 km to meeting

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As always, please leave a comment here or email us at feedback@xpenser.com with your feedback, requests, rants, etc.

As you may have noticed we’ve been launching a significant new release over the last few weeks, adding many of your most frequently requested features. Here’s a quick overview of some of the most prominent features and improvements:

Tagging. This had been your top request for some time: the ability to tag expenses with one or more terms of your choosing. For example, you could tag an expense with “deductible”, “amex”, to indicate it’s a tax deductible expense paid with American Express.

The Web interface is fairly straight forward; go to the Expense page and click on the Tags column to add your tags. To use tags via Email, SMS, Twitter, and IM, use the “hashtag” syntax:

Lunch 34 with Jack #deductible #amex

For voice services such as Jott and Dial2Do, you can also use the word “tags” followed by your tags. For example:

Lunch 34 with Jack tags deductible amex

Search. We’ve added a comprehensive search facility, available from the Expense page. It’s fairly self-explanatory; click the search button and give it a try. The beta test group had particularly good feedback on this, and we hope you enjoy it as well.

Dial2Do – Free US, UK, and International Voice Transcription Service. We’ve been working with the good folks at Dial2Do for some time, and we’re very excited to launch our integration. Dial2Do is a free voice recognition and transcription service with service in the US, UK, and 17 other countries. It’s a very effective service, is international, and signup is available directly from the Xpenser Account page. Give it a try, we know you’ll love it.

Expense Import. As easy as it is to enter expenses into Xpenser, sometimes it makes sense to import your bank statements in batch. To import expenses, download your statement in QIF format from your bank or credit card provider onto your computer, then go to the Expense page and click the Import button.

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You may have also noticed our new home page. We’ve been working towards a minimalist, simple homepage that explains Xpenser as quickly and as simply as possible. Hopefully we’ve come a long way since the original “Halloween” homepage

We’ll be publishing more detailed posts on each of these features, as well as some of the feedback you’ve sent us on how you’re using these features in your workflow.

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Speaking of which: there’s a nice and rapidly growing community around Xpenser and related topics – expense management and tracking, small and medium business cost strategies, tax advice, and so forth.
We’re looking for ways to foster this community and help it grow. Guest posts to this blog have been suggested, as well as a mailing list with periodic (say weekly or monthly) news and advice. We’re open to any and all of these, so please let us know what you would and would not like to see by leaving a comment here or sending us email at feedback@xpenser.com .

Another quick note – by popular request we’ve added Taiwan New Dollar to the list of supported currencies for currency conversion. To use it include the currency code TWD in your expenses. For example:

Lunch 200 twd in Taipei

Having failed to convince everyone in the world to adopt Pacific Standard Time, we’ve finally caved in and implemented international timezone support. You may have noticed that Xpenser used to assume you are in US/Pacific timezone, leading to your expenses sometimes showing up on the day before or after you actually submitted them.

Inaccurate dates are now a thing of the past. Set your timezone via the Account Settings page and see Xpenser get smarter about your dates.

Our efforts to get the whole world to adopt a single currency and date format are not going very well either, so we may have to support internationalization of those in an upcoming release as well. Leave a comment here or write us at feedback@xpenser.com if you’re interested in internationalization and want us to give it more priority.