Xpenser + Jott = Expense Reporting Made Easy

Let’s be hon­est, fill­ing out expense reports is hor­ri­ble.  They are a nec­es­sary evil, often put off until the last pos­si­ble minute.  When I finally get around to fill­ing mine out, I usu­ally find myself remov­ing a moun­tain of crum­pled receipts from my “George Costanza like” wal­let and then try­ing in vein to make sense of it all.  Hours later I finally get the whole mess put in order, plugged into a spread­sheet, copied, and sub­mit­ted — curs­ing all the while as I vow never to put this off until the last minute again.  Of course I do put it off, and monthly the process is repeated.

I believe that I have found the answer in the form of xpenser.com

Xpenser.com is a web based tool that allows you to eas­ily track your expenses.  It fea­tures a very sim­ple inter­face, and a few very pow­er­ful fea­tures.  There are four fields for entry of expenses — Type, Amount, Notes, and Date.  It is clean and easy.  It will con­vert miles into dol­lars auto­mat­i­cally and the infor­ma­tion can be down­loaded in numer­ous spread­sheet for­mats.  For me, it took all of about 2 sec­onds for me to see the value of this tool, and hence it was added imme­di­ately to my fire­fox tool­bar. It will email or text updates, and you can enter to it via email, text, twit­ter or directly through the site itself.   It could not be more easy… or could it?

As it turns out, xpenser.com inte­grates with another one of my favorite web based tools jott.com.  Thus, when it comes to expense reports you can now lit­er­ally just phone it in.  Call Jott (num­ber 9 on my speed dial), say the name of your expense, the amount, and any notes, and you are done.  Jott will plug every­thing into xpenser and send you a con­fir­ma­tion ver­i­fy­ing your entry.  This is a great way to make wind­shield time more val­ue­able — call­ing in the day’s expenses and mileage as you make the drive home.

This com­bi­na­tion of free, web based tools is a sim­ple way to make your life eas­ier.   Give xpenser and jott a try and let me know what you think.

Xpenser — Mobile Expense Track­ing and Reporting