Over the last year, prices for all types of commodities have gone up at extreme rates. Gas, rice, corn, bottled water, and even recycled paper have had noticeable changes in prices. The most obvious of all these prices changes (not just in the US) are the insane gas prices. With the gas prices going up, it is becoming ever more painful to drive a car these days, and there’s no end in sight! It’s painful to see a Honda Civic require US$60.00 for a fill up, so a few of us in the office have started changing our commuting habit to try and stretch all the pennies.

Luckily for a few of us in the office, we actually live in San Francisco, making coming into the office somewhat bearable. Take a look at one of our analysis charts (though we can’t say who…) on what we spend on gas/transportation while both living and working in San Francisco. One thing to note is that the apartment complex which the person is renting from includes a shuttle to the Financial District in San Francisco (where our offices are):

So, without further ado, our second (non-scientific, but very very informative) poll!
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Again, we’d like to thank everyone for helping to make Expensr so successful so far! E-mail us at contact@expensr.com if you’ve got any other questions or concerns (or, follow us on Twitter/Expensr). We’re looking forward to seeing the poll results!

Finally, we’re just about to start openly accepting MoneyStrands Private Beta invitation requests, so hang tight! In case anyone is wondering, Expensr users will get first priority to our limited private beta - we really value your feedback (especially when you can readily compare it to how Expensr is right now!). We want to make sure things are how you expect (or better, hopefully!) - so we have to limit the private beta a bit to make sure we can address everyone’s concerns. For those who are evaluating expensr but do not have an account yet, don’t worry - we will have an open public beta soon after the private beta session!

-phil @ Expensr

For those waiting for some “sneak peek” information about MoneyStrands, we’ve got a great post for you today!  The Finovate 2008 Conference video’s are finally published! A little while ago, we attended the Finovate Startup 2008 Conference here in San Francisco. (Finovate is a fast-paced conference specifically geared towards bringing light onto personal finance-focused start-up companies.)

So what happened at Finovate? We made our introductions, saw some very cool ideas, and met some very cool people. But then we got to the good stuff… we demo’ed MoneyStrands! Right now, all that’s available on the MoneyStrands website is our Beta Sign Up form - but rest assured, there is ALOT of work going on behind the scenes! We’re wanting to launch the website as quickly as possbile, but still maintain quality control :).

As you’ll soon see, demo is being run by the Expensr Founders (Shawn Gupta and Reman Child). However, we’re limited to about 5-minutes of presentation time - the demo is run through very quickly (please forgive us!). Hopefully you guys will enjoy what you see there :).

(Windows Media Player) http://www.finovate.com/startup08/expensr_wmv.html

(Quicktime) http://www.finovate.com/startup08/expensr_mov.html

We’ll be providing Expensr users “primetime” access to the MoneyStrands Private Beta, so stay tuned for details! (You can follow us on Twitter for our most up to date information also!)

… maybe some more “sneak peak” screenshots…

As many of you may know, Expensr was recently acquired by Strands thus, the team here in San Francisco (and at Strands as a whole) has been growing at a rapid pace. Due to the influx of employees here at Strands, we wanted to highlight some of the key folks working on Expensr and MoneyStrands, so we can prove that we’re not just robots answering e-mails and bringing cool new features to everyone!

So, we’re going to start our very first “Expensr Exposed” spotlight! This week, we want to focus on a key player that will help bring Expensr and MoneyStrands to the next level… (hint hint!). Some of you may know that along with Expensr, Strands also acquired a company called NetworthIQ for personal finance, investment, and net worth tracking.

Ryan Williams came from that team, and is a key player working on MoneyStrands now! Without further ado, here’s “Ryan, Exposed”:

What was most memorable at your first day at Strands?
Ryan: The most memorable thing from the first day was not having a desk to sit at. Strands has grown tremendously this year and the Corvallis office (which I believe has been a church, courthouse and even a morgue in its past lives) was busting at the seams. I finally found a spot right in front of the bathroom door (well, there was a hallway in between), so I was able to meet many people that day as they noticed the new guy on their way to and from the bathroom. Needless to say, they were quick introductions.

What is one of the most interesting about the Strands (San Francisco) Office?
Ryan: For a small-town guy, I’d often day-dreamed about life in the big city, with high-rises, action and people all around. My trips to the SF office have definitely fulfilled those thoughts. Being in the heart of the Financial District is a fascinating place to be with all the big banks and many technology companies all around. That and the thought in the back of mind thinking, if there’s an earthquake, I’m dead. I’m happy to visit.

What website are you guilty of constantly hitting F5 to read during your days?
Ryan: I’m going to go with twitter, at least when it’s up. I know what you’re thinking, “who cares what you’re doing,” but twitter is like one big public group IM chat, it’s a conversation that never stops and constantly goes in interesting directions. You can find me at twitter.com/ryanwi.

What are you working on right now?
Ryan: These days, I spend most of my time planning features, additions and improvements for moneyStrands. This involves a lot of research on personal finance, talking with people about the money struggles, and exploring other applications to see what works and what doesn’t.

Where did you grow up?
Ryan: I grew up in the pre-WWW era (didn’t get my first email address until college) in Elmira, Oregon, a small town about 15 miles outside of Eugene. I spent most of my time playing sports, with baseball being my favorite. One of the great things about small towns is space. Growing up on 8 acres allows for lots of opportunities to explore outside without getting run over by a car. But, I still prefer being a little closer to civilization and having a grocery store and restaurants just a couple minutes away.

Where does most of your money go?
Ryan: I’d have to go with house here. When are we going to see those 4.5% interest rates again? Hey, if I was perfect at my own finances, I wouldn’t be working so hard on building a better way to manage them.

Thanks for sharing with our users, Ryan!

A few folks have e-mailed us asking what we do on a daily basis - anything from “What’s San Francisco like?” to “What’s going on at Expensr today?”.

Well… we’ve been pushed to our limits of requests to join Twitter (finally, we’ve joined 2008)! We’re still updating the website (stay tuned for some major changes…) and as well, we’ll be using the blog to describe these larger changes and give you updates about how we’re growing. But, for smaller more day-to-day things, please follow us on Twitter!

You can follow us on Twitter HERE. Also, be sure to take a look at the Strands Twitter to hear about what’s going on with Strands (and maybe sneak peeks for moneyStrands!).

We’ve gotten a small handful of e-mails wondering about our website security and privacy practices, especially since you’re putting some important information on here. I just wanted to formally announce that we’ve gotten some very cool certifications that will hopefully put a few minds at rest! I’m happy to announce that we have FINALLY finished a very long process (well, long for us) of formally receiving TRUSTe and HackerSafe certifications!

While this may not seem like a very large update (visually), there have been several changes in the back-end which often go unnoticed. So, if you’re wondering what we’ve been slaving away at, check out the changes in the privacy policy as well as our nifty security logo’s at the bottom of the homepage:

Everyone here at Expensr (and moneyStrands) take security, and your privacy, with the utmost importance!

So what’s next? A handful of you folks have e-mailed us over the last few weeks, giving us very good feedback and suggestions for ways to improve the website. We’ve got a few things up our sleeves coming soon…

One of the cool features about Expensr (which hopefully everyone uses!) is the tagging system. You can use this tagging system to tag and compare yourself anonymously on how you spend your money. Do you know how much people in your age range spend on food? Do you know how much people in your location spend on rent?

Based on a chart we saw today, users in their “30’s” spend significantly more on Entertainment than users in their “20’s”. The folks in the office today had a good argument about where we “waste” money these days depending on your age… (for those wondering, the Expensr office is comprised of about half “20’s” and half “30’s”)

Whenever you log into Expensr, we’ve made it a point to try and bring you a random/interesting fact on the “Home” tab (the first screen you see when you log-in). Hopefully we’ve brought you an interesting fact for water-cooler talk!

What neat piece of information have you learned, if any, from your daily clicking on Expensr?

Thanks to everyone for keeping up with us so far! As we’re building new things, we’re consistently evaluating our upcoming changes and comparing them to our current features. To follow up from our April 15th poll – the results were very, very useful for the team here at Expensr – so thanks for participating everyone.

However, looking at the varying poll results – you can guess they clearly led to more arguments here within the Expensr team. We’re a very opinionated bunch (obviously) and rather than waste more time arguing, we’d like to ask you all – our users who’ve helped build Expensr – for more feedback.

Why exactly would users prefer entering information manually?

We’ve guessed a few things, but our guesses are all over the board… is it for cash transactions ? … is it security concerns? … is it because auto-categorization isn’t 100%? … is it because you have a smaller bank that may not actually be supported for automatic transaction retrieval?

If you could spare 1 minute and write a quick comment – about why you would (or wouldn’t) prefer entering information manually – it’d REALLY help us figure this out!

Also, stay tuned. We’re going to try and get a hold of our moneyStrands demo and presentation from Finovate2008, so you guys know what to expect from moneyStrands! Thanks guys!

-phil @ expensr

So, if you’ve been an expensr user for some time now, you’ve probably been wondering just what exactly has been going on with the expensr team these past couple of months. There haven’t been the frequent updates, the new features, etc - things you’ve come to expect from us and probably drew you into using expensr in the first place. Were we on hiatus? Vacation? Dead pool even? Nope!

Good news, in fact, that I’ve just gotten the thumbs up to finally talk about - we’ve been acquired! It’s good news for us, and better news for you. Let me explain. We’ve been acquired by a company called strands, which has a pretty sweet set of technologies (can’t give away away the gory details just yet, but rest assured, more will be coming soon) that will vastly improve the experience that we can offer you. Add on top of that the extra resources (more developers committed!) and financial backing of a larger company - hopefully you’re as excited as we are about where we can take this in the coming months.

So, how does this affect you? Well, we’ve been working diligently these past couple of months to completely rewrite the expensr codebase (actually, all of the credit goes to the MyStrands team, who’ve done an amazing job) and redesign the product to better reflect where we’ve always wanted to take it. There are still some kinks here and there that need to be ironed out, so we’ve decided to relaunch it separately from expensr.com in a beta period while we bring it up to snuff.

Until then, you can continue to use the expensr you know and like, or - very shortly - we’ll be launching the beta and extending invites to all registered expensr users. We’d love to get your feedback. Check out some more details here.

- Reman

Expensr Acquisition Questions?

… So…

… what’s going to happen with Expensr.com?

For now, nothing’s going to really change. We know you guys have a lot of information stored here (a lot of important information) and may be hesitant use any new service. We’re wanting to make sure any migration plans (to optionally move over to moneyStrands) will be as painless and as transparent as possible. We’ll be sure to keep everyone informed.

… how do I try out moneyStrands?

Current Expensr users will be invited to join the private beta for moneyStrands. We definitely want to hear from our dedicated Expensr users to help drive our next generation money management tools, so stay tuned for more information!

… how is moneyStrands going to be different from Expensr?

We’ve kept track of all the feedback you all have given us so far with Expensr, and have used that to help drive changes to moneyStrands We’ll be using all of our time and new resources to help develop moneyStrands. One of the key features differentiating moneyStrands from Expensr will be the ability to automatically link to your bank, credit card company, or any other financial institution. Also, moneyStrands will be very customizable, with more intuitive community-comparison interfaces as well as some other cool new features!

… is all the information I put into Expensr going to go away?

We’re currently in discussions on how to move folks currently using Expensr to the new moneyStrands website. Because moneyStrands has the ability to automatically link and update to your accounts – we are looking into ways of managing duplicate data for users transferring from Expensr to moneyStrands, as well as streamlining this process.

… what about everyone using Expensr right now?

We will be keeping everyone’s accounts as-is on Expensr– don’t worry. Current Expensr users will also be invited to join the moneyStrands private beta!

Thanks everyone for helping to make Expensr so successful! E-mail us at contact@expensr.com if you’ve got any other questions or concerns.

-phil

Hey guys, we’re just about to push a larger change coming up very soon – and as part of that, we want to get some last minute feedback that we’ve been pondering about. We’re getting conflicting feedback and feature requests about “Automated Transactions” - linking automatically online into your bank account or credit card databases to pull the transaction history.

Some of the feedback has been to actually get transaction history automatically, as its many times easier and faster. However, some other folks have been concerned about potential security risks about typing your information away online - specifically, giving a website your online banking or online credit card information. So…

Well, we’d like to get broader and more open feedback concerning this – so here comes our first poll!

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Thanks everyone for helping to make Expensr so successful so far! E-mail us at contact@expensr.com if you’ve got any other questions or concerns. We’re looking forward to seeing the poll results!

-phil

We’ve gotten a few requests asking about what the office is like here in San Francisco. With sky-high rent prices (not only on offices, but apartments!) - we’re definitely not surprised to have people wanting to track their expenses on Expensr. So, some folks may be thinking “Oh, these guys probably have a super extravagant office with TV’s and Nintendo Wii’s everywhere!”

Without further ado, our office. Don’t mind the mess.

expensr_team_office

-phil