Xpenser Blog

Attention QuickBooks Online users! We’ve added documentation for integrating QuickBooks Online with Xpenser for expense reimbursement. The integration is quick and should take you less than 15 minutes to complete. It’s documented with screenshots step-by-step in this help site article.

Integration with QuickBooks Online works exactly as it would with QuickBooks Desktop. It does the following:

1. Maps your QuickBooks Online Chart of Accounts to Xpenser Categories, therefore synchronizing them so there’s no confusion between the two systems

2. Maps your QuickBooks Vendors to Xpenser Employees, so expense reimbursements are tied directly to a vendor (your employee) in QuickBooks Online

3. Finally, when exporting an expense report to QuickBooks Online, it’s captured as a Bill in QuickBooks and associated with a vendor — no more manual entry!

Questions, comments, feedback? feedback@xpenser.com

It took 1 month of storyboarding, shooting, editing, and re-editing, but we finally have our brand new video. Many props to Gina for the video and editing work along with Yas for the acting job. Here it is:

Xpenser on Vimeo

Most of the video was shot in Downtown San Diego (Broadway & 1st) and the San Diego Airport. Editing was done with iMovie (not recommended, see this article for our thoughts on making a video for a cloud service startup).

Please feel free to share! Would love to hear your feedback at feedback@xpenser.com!

We’ve added a mobile view of our help site for smartphone users, whether you’re on the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone. So if you’re stuck on the go, head on over to http://help.xpenser.com/.

iPhone Fresh Xpense users will want to check out this guide.

Here’s what it looks like on my Samsung Galaxy SII Android phone:

If you have any issues viewing the articles on your smartphone, send us the operating system / browser you’re using to feedback@xpenser.com along with details of what issue you’re having.

Using the Google Docs Viewer extension in either Chrome or Mozilla to view your receipts resulted in the following error message:

It’s been fixed! You can now use the Google Docs Viewer extension to view receipts. To use Google Docs Viewer, make sure you have the Google Docs Viewer (by Google) application installed (here).

For Chrome, click on Toolbar Icon -> Options -> Extensions -> Enable Google Docs Viewer

For Mozilla, click on Firefox -> Add-Ons -> Enable Google Docs Viewer

Let us know if this isn’t working for you! feedback@xpenser.com

We recently moved printing to a different server and in the process removed the PDFs that were attached to every email when you submitted an expense report. We got quite a bit of feedback about it and we’ve re-added the PDF attachment to the email! So the PDF copy of your expense report has been added back to the email when you submit your expense report for approval.

Thanks for all the feedback! Keep it coming! feedback@xpenser.com

We want to give administrators total control of their company account, so we’ve added a new feature that gives administrators a complete overview of the expense report approval flow for each individual within a company. It’s located under the Account tab in “Company and Org Chart” (only seen by administrators). The button called “Review all Approvers” located next to “Upload” will take you to this feature. Do you have a better suggestion for what to call it? Let us know! Comment below or feedback@xpenser.com

The feature tells you exactly how each employee’s expense report is routed, so if you’re having issues with expense report approvals, just refer to this! Click on “Review all Approvers” will bring up a list of each employee and how those expense reports flow through your company’s organizational structure:

“Missing, please fix” tells you that an approver is missing for a particular employee, meaning expense reports for that particular employee is not reaching the appropriate approval manager. Once again, if you have a better suggestion for “Missing, please fix”, let us know!

As always, this fix was due to user feedback. So keep it coming! feedback@xpenser.com

We’ve been looking to update the video on our homepage for quite some time now (see Xpenser home page for the current video). We wanted a new video that is compelling, interesting, short, but also clearly broadcasts what Xpenser does. We could have hired a firm to make an awesome video like this one, but we thought, what if we just made it ourselves? So we did. (None of us have any background in film).

As a team we sat down and did some storyboarding to lay out the foundation of the video. Then Gina, who has some experience in photography, used her DSLR Nikon D90 and iMovie to shoot and edit the entire video from beginning to where we are now (we’re almost done with the video!).

View of Downtown San Diego, where we shot our video, from Coronado Island. Image from Natalie Wong:

So from the perspective of a team that has no experience making film and zero budget, here are some thoughts from before and during the project that might provide some insight:

1. It’s harder than you think, so set a timeline accordingly. We gave ourselves 1 month (about 10 hours per week collectively spent on the project), but in my head at the time I thought we could do it in 2 weeks. I was wrong.

2. Storyboard and start a document (we just used Google Docs) with the exact scenes that need to be shot along with the actors, script, location, props needed. On top of that, give yourselves time to really think through the video about whether or not it makes sense. It helps to make clear to the whole team what the video is trying to accomplish so all of the ideas flow in the same direction. Are we trying to convert more individuals? More accounting folk? Do we want to show the administrator capabilities? We have a ton of cool features to show off in a video — but there’s just not enough time to show it all. So we focused, simplified, and re-focused on the crucial and most compelling features.

3. If it’s planned out correctly, you can shoot all the scenes in one day. A big chunk of the work is in editing and making sure the different scenes flow together, so if you can get all of the filming done in a day, the faster you can get to editing. We didn’t shoot it all in one day, but the extra filming days were because we wanted a different angle on a particular shot post-edit, which leads me to the next point…

4. On the day of the shoot, shoot each scene from different angles, even if you don’t think you’ll need it.

5. Shoot your scenes according to the document, except when you don’t. On the day of the shoot, we suddenly decided it would be a great idea to do a portion of the video at the airport — so we took a detour there and improvised a few scenes on the spot. This is creativity after all, so don’t confine it!

6. After you have all your scenes, it’s just editing. Well, not *just* editing, but A LOT of editing. We had one person do the editing (thanks Gina!) and I think it makes sense to have one person in control of all the editing. Gina would edit and we would give some feedback and restrain ourselves from looking over her back while she made edits (guilty). Once again, there’s a lot of creativity involved in this process, so just let your creative people roam free.

7. Get people who know nothing about your company to watch the video. This is something we could have done more of from beginning to end. After each edit and even if the video doesn’t look anywhere like a finished product, put it in front of new eyes. They’ll catch things you wouldn’t notice even if you put 40 more hours into editing.

8. Spend some time away from it. We did our best to go 4 full days without looking or thinking about the video. After the 4 day break, we were able to catch a few poor transitions and wording problems

9. On editing tools, Gina (who had zero video editing experience prior to this) mentioned that iMovie limited her ability to do some things and recommends Final Cut Pro. She mentioned a lot of trial and error / using Google to learn how to use iMovie (and why it’s limiting).

That’s it for now! We’ll be releasing our new video soon and there will be a much more detailed breakdown of the actual video with some tips and insights on lighting, angles, and transitions. Anybody have any thoughts on making video? Welcome feedback or thoughts!

This fell under the radar, but in mid-January an (unofficial) Windows Phone Application was released for Xpenser. Woohoo! That means applications for just about every smart phone available.

It’s an early release, so we’re looking for lots of feedback. So if you’ve got a Windows Phone, go ahead and download it and let us know what you think (feedback@xpenser.com).

You may have noticed some downtime on the xpenser.com site over the past two days. It turns out that it was directly related to printing reports in HTML format to PDF, which was causing a heavy load on our servers and resulting in a bit of downtime. We’ve resolved the issue by moving printing to an entirely new server so there should not be any further issues with printing reports.

We apologize for this happening — let us know if you have any questions, concerns, or feedback (feedback@xpenser.com)!

I spent a week in the Philippines last year and of all the South East Asian countries I’ve visited, the Philippines was an easy favorite and a place I fell in love with immediately — and of course I had no problems tracking my Cebu Pacific flight expense since I just forwarded my email itinerary to Xpenser. Anyways, there are tons of reasons to like a country like this — amazing food (did you know they put sugar in their spaghetti & meatball dish? Trust me, it’s amazing.), dessert such as Ube (essentially sweet taro), beautiful scenery, and the hustle bustle of jeepneys (LA traffic doesn’t even compare to the unpredictability of Manila traffic).

Lake within a volcano within a lake in Tagaytay, Philippines. Image from Stefan Young:

But what amazed me the most about the Philippines was the fascination with technology, particularly the texting culture of the country (my friend scheduled my entire PADI scuba diving course via text message) and the overall tech-savviness of the entire nation. At a friend’s family function, I saw an entire extended family armed with iPads and iPhones. I even witnessed a 4 year old unlock an iPad and proceed to beat 5 levels of Angry Birds with the nonchalant flick of his baby fingers.

So it should be of no surprise that Xpenser has quite a following in the Philippines, after all, we are right on the cutting-edge of the age-old task of tracking expenses. To start from the beginning, two years ago, Rob Angeles, the founder of Social Media Philippines, wrote this blog post about us. Fast forward to late 2011, JJ Lumagbas, a Computer Science professor at UP Cebu, wrote this review of Xpenser. By the way JJ, we’re looking to add those pretty visual graphs you mentioned in your review sometime this year! Thank you for the feedback!

It’s amazing how far technology has come to remove the physical barriers between countries. To that, I’d like to thank all our supporters in the Philippines and the rest of the world! Keep the feedback coming ( feedback@xpenser.com ) as we love to hear from all of you, no matter which part of the world you’re in.