With the report on screen, you can click on any cell to edit its contents. Changes are automatically updated throughout the form. This includes adding new records (in case you just found a receipt in your coat pocket but don't want to start over from scratch, for example). If you need to do further tweaking and editing, take a quick tour of the menu items that appear when a report is active. Records can be sorted, memorized, reverted, or tagged.

You can also use this as a basic expense reimbursement tracking tool. A Status popup menu will let you specify whether the form has been Not Yet Submitted, Submitted, or Paid.

Signed, sealed, delivered
If you're accustomed to creating handwritten expense reports, your fingers may be twitching in anticipation of putting down your pen once and for all. You now have a sharply formatted report based on the data you diligently collected. Perhaps it's time to sit back and congratulate yourself.

Or perhaps it's time to start sleeping on the sidewalk. We are, after all, talking about money here. If that report doesn't reach the accounting department or the client who'll be reimbursing you, everything you've done up to this point becomes just a technical exercise. Palm Expense Creator gives you several options for delivering your important data.

The easiest and most traditional method is to print and send the reports. If you need to print expenses on preformatted pages, the program's preferences give you the ability to print the data without the formatting, plus control the offset adjustment of the printed image to improve the layout.

However, this still doesn't account for that guy in the mailroom whose bike you accidentally crushed under your car's tires last week, and who seems to be "accidentally" shredding all of your outgoing letters. If you're not comfortable sending the report by regular mail, Expense Creator includes the built-in functionality to send it by email. And if you're still worried that some nefarious person might intercept your email, there are options for including digital signatures using the Entrust or I-Sign services. Double-clicking the signature fields, as shown in Figure D, lets you add a digital signature, ensuring that the data is really from you.

FIGURE D

Double-clicking the signature fields lets you add a digital signature, ensuring that the data is really from you. Click picture for a larger image.

There are also a variety of options for exporting and saving the data. You can customize the default method of exporting to create a tab-delimited text file that includes only the fields and information you need in any order. Choosing Save As from the File menu gives you a choice of saving to Informed's file formats, or as a PDF file or TIFF image file.