Stop Wasting Your Time Organizing Receipts: Shortcuts Found Here

Receipts aren't particularly easy to file. And, many offices have turned to scanners as a way to manage financial records without using small slips of paper that can be lost. But when you consider how many receipts a person can obtain in a day, it's not always practical to scan each one by hand.

This is especially true if you need to add the information listed on that receipt to Quickbooks or other accounting software, as well. In order to speed up the process, several companies have developed very different options for scanning receipts and retrieving the information listed on them.

Shoeboxed

When it comes to minimizing the time you spend on receipts, Shoeboxed's service may be one of the simplest options available. You simply pack all of your receipts into one of Shoeboxed's blue envelopes and mail it in. The company then scans in each receipt and processes it with specialized optical-character recognition (OCR) software.

Shoeboxed posts your receipts, and - more importantly - the information from each one, online. The information from your expenses can be easily downloaded and imported into Quickbooks, Freshbooks, and several other bookkeeping-software packages. The site even categorizes your receipts automatically, details the source of the receipt, and can generate statistics about your expenses.

Shoeboxed offers different levels of service, based on the number of receipts you need to scan in a month. The options vary from the "Lite" plan - which lets you send in 50 receipts each month for $9.95 - to the "Business" plan, which lets you send in 500 receipts each month for $49.95. Each plan includes catch-up scanning, allowing you to send in up to 1,000 additional receipts beyond your monthly allotment.

One factor that can affect which plan you choose is whether you need your receipts returned for record-keeping purposes. With the most basic plan, Shoeboxed shreds and recycles your receipts; however, with more expensive plans, they will be returned to you. If you have a significant number of business cards that need to be added to an electronic address book, you can also send those into Shoeboxed. The service handles business cards similarly to how it processes receipts, turning cards into information that you can easily add to Microsoft Outlook or other software.

NeatReceipt

There are also tools that allow you to keep your receipts in-house, rather than sending them out to be processed. The NeatReceipts Scanner was designed with processing receipts in mind. While it does require a little more effort on your part - you must feed each receipt into the scanner - it will process each one and use custom OCR software to translate the information on the receipt into data you can easily import into your bookkeeping software. The NeatReceipts system is significantly smaller than most other scanners, weighing less than 1 pound.

NeatReceipts comes with custom software that allows you to create expense reports and other documents from your receipts. It can also process business cards and scan other files just as easily as it handles receipts. With longer documents, the OCR software recognizes text and saves it in searchable portable document formats (PDFs). The system is available in both Mac and PC versions.

How do you organize these important little scraps of paper? Share what works and what doesn't.