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.

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 !

Bindu quickly resolved the issue and the fine folks at Apple expedited the review to get the new version in the app store, so please be sure to upgrade to the latest version (build 46).

If you have receipts or expenses stuck on the iPhone, please do the following before upgrading to build 46:

If you’re using iOS 3.x, simply close the app, then restart it.

If you’re using iOS 4.x:

• Open up the Fresh Xpense app
• Press and hold the power button until the “slide to power off” message is displayed
• Release the power button, then press the home button until Fresh Xpense quits

Then you should be able to restart Fresh Xpense and the receipts and expenses should start uploading. If it gets stuck again, you’ll need to restart it again using the above instructions.

Here’s a particularly brilliant post from Deborah Chang, a middle school science teacher in Houston, TX, called “Keeping Track of Your Finances: The Easy Way“. Complete with screenshots, it provides a detailed overview of how she uses Xpenser to track her travel expenses for a conference, and includes a nice overview of how tags can be used.

Thank you Deborah for your great writeup!

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.