Selling Shouldn’t Cost You Money

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If you’re a traveling rep or business owner, I am sure this sounds familiar.

You have a quick sandwich on the road and pay cash, buy a day of internet access at the airport to check your mail, a few bucks on tolls and $20 to fill up your rental car before dropping it off at the station.

Relatively modest charges that easily add up to a couple of hundred bucks every month.

The idea was to incorporate those charges on an expense report, but by the time you get to that little project, your expenses got mixed in with other charges to your credit card or, if you paid cash, you completely forgot about spending the money anyway.

At best, you’re spending too much time to figure out what the heck you spent. Worst case, you’re missing expenses on your report for which you should be reimbursed.

Here’s a little tool that can help you with that.

Xpenser is as simple as it is clever. Sign up and send an email to a special email address every time you have an expense. The subject field of your email describes the charge.

For instance, “Lunch $12 on my way to the airport” records an entry for this category (lunch), the amount ($12) while including the expense description. Alternatively, “Project Blue $7.50 copying report for update meeting” will create a charge assigned to Project Blue. Handy if you’re a professional and bill your clients for expenses on a project basis.

A secure page that only you can access displays all your charges. You can sort by expense category, date, amounts are added and you can export all of this information to Excel, Quicken or Freshbooks for billing or accounting purposes.

So when you leave your lunch place, you use your Blackberry to record the expense. When you pick up the bar tab after a few drinks with a client, you add it to Xpenser right away.

If you don’t like emailing, Xpenser also supports submitting your charges by Instant Messenger, text message or even by leaving a voice message using Jott - which we previously reviewed here.

Give it a try - I love it and use it a lot. Oh, and did I mention it’s free?

I am curious to see your thoughts. Would this work for you? Let us know in the comments.