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!

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 .

Your privacy is very important to us. We actually mean it when we say that; we’re all big users of Xpenser ourselves, so it’s our own privacy we’re protecting when we protect yours.

Take a look at our Privacy Policy and let us know of any feedback you might have.

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.

Thanks to the lovely folks at Twitter we now have a local SMS short code for India: 5566511 . Details on how to use Xpenser via Twitter can be found at the Using Xpenser with Twitter page.

Our growing community of Safari users (that’s about 10% of you out there, including our iPhone users) had been experiencing an annoying rendering issue with the top menu bar on the Expenses and Reports pages. As of tonight, that bug should be gone. We’ve tested with various versions of Safari and we think we got it stamped out. Take a look and let us know if you run into any problems.

By the way, if you’re an iPhone user let us know at feedback@xpenser.com; we’d like to pick your brain about how to make Xpenser be great on the iPhone.

For some inexplicable reason we’re obsessed with making expense tracking as simple as possible. We spend days and nights thinking about it, and pore over your feedback to find new ways.

We might’ve found the simplest way yet - via your browser’s search box. If you’re using FireFox, Internet Explorer 7, or any other browsers that supports OpenSearch, you’ll have noticed a search bar at the top right hand side of your browser. Now you can enter your expense into that search box and hit enter to record it, from any web page, without even having to visit Xpenser.com .

The screencast below shows how to set it up and use it. If you’re screencast challenged, here’s how it works:

• In FireFox, go to Xpenser.com, and click on the icon on the left hand side of your browser’s search box. You’ll see an option for “Add Xpenser”. Select this. You should now see the Xpenser icon in the browser’s search box.
• In Internet Explorer 7, click on the down arrow at rightmost part of the browser’s search bar. You’ll see an option for “Add Search Providers -> Xpenser”. Click on this and add Xpenser. Now select Xpenser as the search engine by clicking the down arrow again and selecting Xpenser.

That’s it. Now you can add expenses from your browser search box from any web page with the minimal number of keystrokes.

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to see your latest expenses in your favorite home page? Have them magically show up in My Yahoo, iGoogle, Google Reader, Bloglines, or Netvibes?

Through the magic of RSS this is now possible. RSS is a format that allows data to be published by providers and aggregated and displayed by readers in a standard way. And as of today, should you choose to enable it, Xpenser offers a private RSS feed of your expenses.

To configure this, go to the Account Configure page (click the “Configure” link on the Account page), read the instructions carefully, and click enable. You’ll then be able to add your Xpenser expense feed to your favorite RSS reader.

Do let us know if you end up creating some fantastic widget to display the feed, or if you use the feed to integrate with your favorite software. For the technically minded out there, note that we may end up modifying the format of the feed based on feedback and as we add new features and fields.

The RSS feature was very much driven by your input and all your help testing. A sincere thanks to everyone that helped make it happen. We love to hear from you and take your feedback seriously, so don’t be shy, drop us a comment below or write us at feedback@xpenser.com and let us know what you think.

Xpenser is bringing mobile expense management to FreshBooks.

FreshBooks is a wonderful solution for managing your clients and invoices online, and they’re known for putting service back in customer service. It turns out a lot of Xpenser users also use FreshBooks, and vice-versa.

Our customers asked us: wouldn’t it be great if Xpenser and FreshBooks integrated so we could capture expenses from any device anywhere and automatically create invoices for them in FreshBooks?

Excellent idea, we thought. Starting today you can do exactly that: capture and manage your expenses with Xpenser, and export them into existing or new invoices in FreshBooks. Everything is available from the Export option in the Expense page, as you can see in this screencast below. Give it a try, and as always let us know what you think.

Twitter is wonderful. What is it?

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

We used Twitter extensively during the San Diego fires to keep in touch (we’re based in San Diego), and I use it to communicate with my brother half-way around the world. It’s pretty simple - you submit your update to Twitter who then publishes it to the world, your friends, or a particular person.

A big part of the appeal is the number of interfaces it supports - like Xpenser, Twitter is accessible via SMS, IM, Web, and a number of other interfaces.

We’ve integrated Twitter with Xpenser, so now you can submit your expenses from any interface Twitter supports. This means, for example, that our international customers can now send us their expenses via SMS by using the Twitter access numbers.

If you already have a Twitter account, all you have to do is register your Twitter account with Xpenser and submit your expenses by sending them as direct messages to the user xpn. For example, “d xpn lunch 45.13 with Jack and Jill”, where “d xpn” means send a direct message to xpn.

If you don’t have a Twitter account, you can create one via the Web or directly from your phone using SMS. From your phone:

Start by texting the word help to 40404 if you’re in the United States. From Canada, use our new Canadian short code, 21212. For international Twitters, use the new UK long code: +44 7624 801423. Australia can use the new UK long code, and Italy is a special case; write us and we’ll give you more information. India has its own short code: 5566511.

Once you’ve created your account register it with Xpenser and you’re ready to go. Submit your expenses by sending SMS messages to Twitter (find the access number for your country above) in the form of:

d xpn parking 35.13 airport

Which means: send a direct message to the user xpn with my expense of 35.13 for parking at the airport.

Check out the Twitter FAQ for more information, and happy Xpensing with Twitter. As always, let us know if you have any questions, comments, etc.