…to revive the Xpenser blog! We’re back! We apologize for the absence and hope to get the conversation started once again.

Quite frankly, we’ve been busy keeping up with the tremendous growth we saw over the past year (thanks to all of you for spreading the word!), adding new features (most recently: Project Based Accounting, more to come on that in the next post), and working on our support website filled with screenshots and screencasts (help.xpenser.com for a sneak preview — official launch coming soon).

We’re excited for what this new year brings and have several new features in mind. But as you know, we love hearing from our customers. What are some features you hope to see this year?

Go ahead and comment below or shoot us an email at feedback@xpenser.com.

Happy new year everyone !

Quick note: Quicken (QIF) export now includes categories (thanks Chuck for pushing us to make it happen), just in time for tax preparation.

Note that Categories are part of the premium version of Xpenser (Xpenser for Business), so if you’d like to use them let us know to convert your account (self-service upgrade of accounts will be available soon).

Not long ago by popular request we added confirmation replies for items submitted via email. Xpenserites everywhere rejoiced and tears of joy flowed.

As with any good feature, there were also interesting side effects. In particular, our confirmation replies and your “out of office” replies decided to see who could out-do the other: you’d send in an email, we’d reply with a confirmation, your robot would reply with an “out of office”, we’d respond to that, and so forth.

We are now very cleverly avoiding this by looking for common “out of office” replies and ignoring them. We will be employing fancy artificial intelligence techniques to this in the future, but in the meanwhile we wanted to cover non-English responses as well.

So: how do you say “Out of office” in your language? If there’s a standard “Out of office” reply people typically setup in your language please either leave it in a comment below or email us at feedback@xpenser.com so we can add it to the ignore list.

We’ve had a long standing request to have tags copied along with expenses when copying between reports. Just today Buford requested this, and his request was the one that put it over the edge and caused us to fix it (thanks Buford).

Copying of expenses now also copies their tags. Go forth and merrily copy all over the place.

If you have a feature you want to see implemented let us know at feedback@xpenser.com ; we love to hear it and your request might just be the one to make it happen.

As you might know we’ve long supported response messages for SMS expenses: when you send us an expense via SMS, we respond with an SMS letting you know we received it and telling you the report balance.

Well, we’ve long gotten requests to respond to email submissions in the same way: to send an acknowledgement reply that includes the report balance.

The last request finally did it (thanks Uri!) and we turned on responses for email submissions. Now each time you submit an expense via email you’ll get a response so you can be sure we got it and processed it.

This means, by the way, that you can now check the balance on your reports by sending an email with the subject “balance” to e@xpenser.com .

We hope you like it. I’m sure you’ll let us know if you don’t It’s feedback@xpenser.com as always.

Xpenser for Business, the business version of our product that provides a comprehensive expense management solution for your company, supports the concept of Categories, defined company-wide, as well as the free-form Type supported in the basic version.

We’ve updated the CSV export format to support this new field, so in addition to the existing fields you’re used to seeing you should now also see a “category” field. The exported fields are:

"id","date","type","category","amount","notes","tags","rawamount"

We now have quite a few companies and non-profits enjoying Xpenser for Business. If you’d like to get your hands on it before it’s widely available later this year please drop us a line at feedback@xpenser.com and we’ll get you setup with a trial account.

By popular request we’ve enhanced the Excel export capabilities to support the international date format – you should now see day/month/year style dates if you’ve set your date display style to international via the Account Settings page.

The new years brings with it an update to the IRS standard mileage rates: the rate is now 51 cents per mile for business miles driven.

We’ve updated the default rate for Xpenser, and as you might know you can always set your own rate from the Keywords page.

Happy new year everybody!

We’ve modified the behavior of expense copying: copied expenses now retain their original date instead of taking on today’s date. Here’s why:

Xpenser has long allowed you to move and copy expenses between reports. We generally recommend against widespread copying, as having multiple copies of each expense can make your accounting more difficult.

It turns out the copy feature was often used to implement a poor man’s recurring expense feature – you would create a report called “Recurring expenses”, record your recurring expenses in there, and each month use the Copy feature to copy the expenses to your current report.

For this reason we would update the date of the expense to the current date when copying – that is, the copied expense would take on today’s date instead of the date you originally entered it.

While this worked well for the recurring expense crowd, it was often confusing for everybody else. So after discussion and consideration we’ve decided to go with the principle of least surprise and retain the original date.

We’ll be implementing recurring expenses properly down the road, obviating the need for this work-around.

As always, don’t forget to let us know what features are most important to you – we use your feedback in deciding what to prioritize: feedback@xpenser.com .

And don’t go copying too many expenses around

Rob tells me that the Xpenser Android app is now available from appoke, allowing a wider range of countries to download and use it. Thanks Rob, and welcome the rest of the world!