As you may have noticed, we recently launched the “Projects” feature for Xpenser (www.xpenser.com/projects/). The idea is to allow you to attribute expenses and income to a particular Project, Client, Customer, Job, Cost center, or Location. Some call this “project based accounting” or “project based expense tracking”.

Since this can be described in so many different ways we allow you to define your own terminology – call it a Project, Customer, Job, or anything else you like.

This new feature provides two benefits: (1) track expenses by project and (2) bill your customers faster. The end result? More accurate billing and faster payments.

A bit of background on Project based Accounting: Many of our customers track expenses based on the corresponding project(s) (or client, cost center, etc.) they are working on – this is common in consulting, financial services, construction, web-design, real estate, and law firms. They do this in order to figure out total project expenses to bill to those clients, or to allow cost based accounting.

To get started, click on the Projects tab. Define your terminology and add a few active projects.

Now go back to your Expenses page and you’ll see an option to associate your expense report with a project.

You’ll also see the option to select a project when you enter a new expense.

You can also define approval roles for your projects so your expense reports get routed to different people based on which project they’re associated with – the approver for project 1 might be different from that of project 2.

In upcoming releases we’ll allow you to define many more per-project settings, such as your hourly rates, mileage rates, etc. Let us know what you’d like to see added.

As you know, we love feedback, so please give it a try and let us know what works well and what could use improvement: feedback@xpenser.com.

Also, let’s find a name that sticks. Project based accounting? Project based expense tracking? What does your business call this?

Please note that this feature is only available in Xpenser For Business, not in Personal accounts.

The Xpenser iPhone interface is now live, available by visiting http://xpenser.com/ via your iPhone.

We wanted to express our sincere thanks to all of the testers; the quality of your feedback was unbelievable. We’ve incorporated the first round of feedback into the interface and will be rolling out the rest over the next few weeks and months. We still want to hear from you, so leave comments here or email us at feedback@xpenser.com . Don’t be shy about direct and honest feedback; we’re just as happy to hear about what could be improved as “it looks great”.

To make it easier to get to Xpenser, once you visit http://xpenser.com/ with your iPhone hit the “+” icon at the bottom of the screen and select “Add to Home Screen”. This will put the Xpenser icon on your iPhone home screen and allow you to enter your expenses with a single click.