Receipt-tracking in this modern world
December 31, 2016 10:04 AM Subscribe
With year- end tax prep, I am prompted to wonder if there's a better way to track receipts than I've been doing, using Paperless and a scanner.
For some years now, my wife and I have been using a scanner and the Mac app Paperless for paper receipts (and of course getting electronic receipts when practical). Paperless essentially acts a spreadsheet that associates a scan with each row, which is fine in theory, but it's never been particularly smart (it attempts to populate fields based on the contents of the scan, with very limited success), and it's increasingly buggy.
We're already planning on switching to capturing receipts with our phones when they're printed and sending them straight to my computer to import into Paperless. Surveying the Mac apps out there, I don't see a lot of alternatives except for Neat (which is now priced as a monthly service, and priced a bit high IMO) and Shoeboxed (also a monthly service, and I'm just not thrilled about someone else owning my receipts).
Is there something I'm missing? Is there a better way? We've got an iOS/Mac household. We both have a reasonable level of tech savvy. I'm willing to do some upfront work if it'll save work down the line, but the goal is to capture more receipts more accurately with less annoyance. We don't currently have much need to capture receipts to submit for reimbursement—this is all for tax purposes (I'm self-employed, she has very limited need to submit for reimbursement).
For some years now, my wife and I have been using a scanner and the Mac app Paperless for paper receipts (and of course getting electronic receipts when practical). Paperless essentially acts a spreadsheet that associates a scan with each row, which is fine in theory, but it's never been particularly smart (it attempts to populate fields based on the contents of the scan, with very limited success), and it's increasingly buggy.
We're already planning on switching to capturing receipts with our phones when they're printed and sending them straight to my computer to import into Paperless. Surveying the Mac apps out there, I don't see a lot of alternatives except for Neat (which is now priced as a monthly service, and priced a bit high IMO) and Shoeboxed (also a monthly service, and I'm just not thrilled about someone else owning my receipts).
Is there something I'm missing? Is there a better way? We've got an iOS/Mac household. We both have a reasonable level of tech savvy. I'm willing to do some upfront work if it'll save work down the line, but the goal is to capture more receipts more accurately with less annoyance. We don't currently have much need to capture receipts to submit for reimbursement—this is all for tax purposes (I'm self-employed, she has very limited need to submit for reimbursement).
Who do you bank with? All of my business expenses (save for ~20 checks) go on a Chase Visa; their site auto-tags every purchase based on categories I've set up and at the end of the year I go through my statements, correct anything that was miss-categorized and download a summary complete with totals for my accountant. No paper receipt wrangling necessary and it only takes an hour or two. If your banking institution doesn't offer this sort of service Mint will do it for free, but you do have to give them access to your bank account.
posted by bizwank at 8:21 PM on December 31, 2016
posted by bizwank at 8:21 PM on December 31, 2016
Generally, the IRS will want some itemized receipt describing what was purchased, especially for larger purchases. Merely producing a bank statement that says you spent $200 at Office Depot is likely to get your expense disallowed during an audit. If your accountant hasn't flagged this as a serious issue, you might want to ask why that is.
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/what-kind-of-records-should-i-keep
"Expenses are the costs you incur (other than purchases) to carry on your business. Your supporting documents should show the amount paid and a description that shows the amount was for a business expense."
Your bank statement will be missing the all-important "description that shows the amount was for a business expense." Also, your bank statement won't be useful if you need to return merchandise, establish the purchase date of something for warranty purposes, or many other common uses for the receipt. In fact, there are still merchants that will balk at accepting an image of a receipt as proof of purchase, so we typically capture everything electronically but still keep the paper for certain merchants, at least through the returns window.
posted by jgreco at 8:54 PM on December 31, 2016
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/what-kind-of-records-should-i-keep
"Expenses are the costs you incur (other than purchases) to carry on your business. Your supporting documents should show the amount paid and a description that shows the amount was for a business expense."
Your bank statement will be missing the all-important "description that shows the amount was for a business expense." Also, your bank statement won't be useful if you need to return merchandise, establish the purchase date of something for warranty purposes, or many other common uses for the receipt. In fact, there are still merchants that will balk at accepting an image of a receipt as proof of purchase, so we typically capture everything electronically but still keep the paper for certain merchants, at least through the returns window.
posted by jgreco at 8:54 PM on December 31, 2016
If you purchase everything from Amazon or other vendors who provide emailed receipts and an account/order history (as I do) you have everything you need to meet the IRS' record keeping requirements as well as deal with any warranty/return issues. Not every business can operate this way, but if you can it's a real time-and-space-saver. Make sure you have good backups though.
posted by bizwank at 10:35 AM on January 1, 2017
posted by bizwank at 10:35 AM on January 1, 2017
That's certainly more likely to be workable for large vendors. However, be careful of smaller vendors, especially ones that go out of business, or even consider the issues of an e-mail service provider that goes out of business. Yahoo!, for example, might not be in the free e-mail business in a few years, and will you lose access to your e-mail? Heck, one of our local banks seems to change their web portal provider two or three times a decade, so online access is questionable. I've also had vendors toss an old web portal for new, without preserving the ability to access old records, and I've also seen seemingly-stable vendors go out of business, taking their records with them.
Bear in mind that the IRS may require you to retain records for seven years, or even indefinitely under certain circumstances, which is a difficult target to hit in this era of cloud startups and mergers, so I'd be strongly inclined towards options that allow local retention of the records, and less reliance on the ongoing reliability of records availability at e-mail providers and merchants.
Going back to the "electronic receipts" mentioned in the original message, I've *never* found these to be generally useful, because they're usually either a pointer to a web page that won't be available in a few years, or HTML crap that includes resources on a web page that isn't available in a few years, and this assumes I'd run an e-mail client on the system that runs our accounting, which we don't.
The whole "paperless statement" thing reeks of "convenient way to avoid the cost of printing and mailing legally required financial documentation". I just logged in to check, and the largest bank in the US, Chase, is only able to provide seven years worth of statements. Bank of America also seems to go back to 2010. Citi appears to be able to roll all the way back to 1992, at least for credit cards. Our local credit union, only two years. This raises lots of questions about whether electronic documents would be available when you need them, unless you take the time to print or store them locally. Personally, I'd rather just have the banks mail them to me and then run them through the scanner at my leisure, rather than having to remember the quirks of logging into many different financial websites every month (and actually taking an hour to do so), then figure out how to download the data and transform the files into a PDF if they're not already, then import them into Rack2-Filer (our electronic documents manager).
Electronic receipts are even worse since they're typically intended as a way for a retailer to be able to establish a business relationship with your e-mail address, so that they can spam you so hard. There's no intention for the format to be usable or useful to you, so you might get text, or HTML, or a link to their website, or once in a while a PDF. In theory, I'd MUCH prefer an electronic receipt, but for that to be meaningful, it would have to be in a format that didn't require me to immediately print it out to get it in a consistent preserved state, and then scan it in to our records. It'd also have to not come with a firehose of e-mail spamvertisements.
It'd be great if, at a retail establishment, I could ApplePay something and receive a full receipt electronically on my phone, automatically imported into Quicken Mobile, which would then ask me to categorize the expense(s). That'd be useful. But electronic receipts aren't about being useful to the consumer. So we don't have this.
Anyways, I didn't have my phone handy when I wrote my earlier responses, and I came back to make note that there appear to be some iOS document scanner apps that might be suitable to the original question here. I selected CamScanner back in 2011 and it's been suitable but not fantastic for my workflow, which is mostly to scan a legible copy and then be able to immediately download or import that to something else. It has the ability to upload to cloud drive services or e-mail the documents. You can then download scanned documents and handle them as you wish. It looks like there might be some other choices today, such as Scanner Pro, that could be more suitable.
I think the big question here for the original poster would have to be what happens next in the workflow. Getting scanned data isn't terribly hard by itself, but the real question here seems to be how to do so in a useful way. Are you doing more than just the spreadsheet at some point? What software are you using for accounting for your business? Is it able to store scanned receipts for you? The only way to really solve the problem is to look at the whole thing.
So let me describe what happens here. Incurring an expense results in a categorized record in Quicken. This can happen at the Quicken program interface, and still does in some cases, but most commonly we pull out a phone. Depending on who does it: My slightly-less-OCD wife goes into the Quicken app, enters the expense, takes a photo with the Quicken app, selects a category and account, enters a descriptive memo, and hits save. My slightly-more-OCD self takes a photo with CamScanner and trims and inspects it for readability, saves it to the camera roll, goes into the Quicken app, enters the expense, imports the trimmed photo from the camera roll, selects a category and account, enters a descriptive memo, and hits save. From there, the Quicken app uploads it to the Quicken Cloud. The Quicken program will then download it, the next time it is run, at which point the receipt and transaction data are imported to the local Quicken data file, which we back up religiously. There's no need for further massaging of the data, and it's unusual for us to review it beyond the monthly reconciliation to bank statements. Yearly, at tax time, I dump a set of Quicken reports and go through, line by line, checking for anything that feels like it was maybe miscategorized. I then grab the numbers at the bottom of each report, which are each 1040 line items, fill them into TurboTax, and move along.
The point I want to illustrate here is that there is normally no manual handling or reviewing of the receipt image data once it is entered into the system. Yet it is there, quickly and efficiently, searchable in Quicken (more easily if you've keyed in an intelligent memo), and this is pretty cool.
Now, what I've described is only applicable to receipts. We still find it necessary to have a sheet scanner. Our Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 and Rack2Filer Smart has been a powerhouse for converting documents to electronic, and much better than the old flatbed. It's allowed us to convert what used to be several dozen banker's boxes worth of records into a few dozen GB worth of PDF data that's easily backed up and cached in a safe deposit box, along with the Quicken and TurboTax data.
I'm actually puzzled that there aren't about fifty different posters in this thread. I was hoping to find some cool new ideas too.
posted by jgreco at 6:29 AM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
Bear in mind that the IRS may require you to retain records for seven years, or even indefinitely under certain circumstances, which is a difficult target to hit in this era of cloud startups and mergers, so I'd be strongly inclined towards options that allow local retention of the records, and less reliance on the ongoing reliability of records availability at e-mail providers and merchants.
Going back to the "electronic receipts" mentioned in the original message, I've *never* found these to be generally useful, because they're usually either a pointer to a web page that won't be available in a few years, or HTML crap that includes resources on a web page that isn't available in a few years, and this assumes I'd run an e-mail client on the system that runs our accounting, which we don't.
The whole "paperless statement" thing reeks of "convenient way to avoid the cost of printing and mailing legally required financial documentation". I just logged in to check, and the largest bank in the US, Chase, is only able to provide seven years worth of statements. Bank of America also seems to go back to 2010. Citi appears to be able to roll all the way back to 1992, at least for credit cards. Our local credit union, only two years. This raises lots of questions about whether electronic documents would be available when you need them, unless you take the time to print or store them locally. Personally, I'd rather just have the banks mail them to me and then run them through the scanner at my leisure, rather than having to remember the quirks of logging into many different financial websites every month (and actually taking an hour to do so), then figure out how to download the data and transform the files into a PDF if they're not already, then import them into Rack2-Filer (our electronic documents manager).
Electronic receipts are even worse since they're typically intended as a way for a retailer to be able to establish a business relationship with your e-mail address, so that they can spam you so hard. There's no intention for the format to be usable or useful to you, so you might get text, or HTML, or a link to their website, or once in a while a PDF. In theory, I'd MUCH prefer an electronic receipt, but for that to be meaningful, it would have to be in a format that didn't require me to immediately print it out to get it in a consistent preserved state, and then scan it in to our records. It'd also have to not come with a firehose of e-mail spamvertisements.
It'd be great if, at a retail establishment, I could ApplePay something and receive a full receipt electronically on my phone, automatically imported into Quicken Mobile, which would then ask me to categorize the expense(s). That'd be useful. But electronic receipts aren't about being useful to the consumer. So we don't have this.
Anyways, I didn't have my phone handy when I wrote my earlier responses, and I came back to make note that there appear to be some iOS document scanner apps that might be suitable to the original question here. I selected CamScanner back in 2011 and it's been suitable but not fantastic for my workflow, which is mostly to scan a legible copy and then be able to immediately download or import that to something else. It has the ability to upload to cloud drive services or e-mail the documents. You can then download scanned documents and handle them as you wish. It looks like there might be some other choices today, such as Scanner Pro, that could be more suitable.
I think the big question here for the original poster would have to be what happens next in the workflow. Getting scanned data isn't terribly hard by itself, but the real question here seems to be how to do so in a useful way. Are you doing more than just the spreadsheet at some point? What software are you using for accounting for your business? Is it able to store scanned receipts for you? The only way to really solve the problem is to look at the whole thing.
So let me describe what happens here. Incurring an expense results in a categorized record in Quicken. This can happen at the Quicken program interface, and still does in some cases, but most commonly we pull out a phone. Depending on who does it: My slightly-less-OCD wife goes into the Quicken app, enters the expense, takes a photo with the Quicken app, selects a category and account, enters a descriptive memo, and hits save. My slightly-more-OCD self takes a photo with CamScanner and trims and inspects it for readability, saves it to the camera roll, goes into the Quicken app, enters the expense, imports the trimmed photo from the camera roll, selects a category and account, enters a descriptive memo, and hits save. From there, the Quicken app uploads it to the Quicken Cloud. The Quicken program will then download it, the next time it is run, at which point the receipt and transaction data are imported to the local Quicken data file, which we back up religiously. There's no need for further massaging of the data, and it's unusual for us to review it beyond the monthly reconciliation to bank statements. Yearly, at tax time, I dump a set of Quicken reports and go through, line by line, checking for anything that feels like it was maybe miscategorized. I then grab the numbers at the bottom of each report, which are each 1040 line items, fill them into TurboTax, and move along.
The point I want to illustrate here is that there is normally no manual handling or reviewing of the receipt image data once it is entered into the system. Yet it is there, quickly and efficiently, searchable in Quicken (more easily if you've keyed in an intelligent memo), and this is pretty cool.
Now, what I've described is only applicable to receipts. We still find it necessary to have a sheet scanner. Our Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 and Rack2Filer Smart has been a powerhouse for converting documents to electronic, and much better than the old flatbed. It's allowed us to convert what used to be several dozen banker's boxes worth of records into a few dozen GB worth of PDF data that's easily backed up and cached in a safe deposit box, along with the Quicken and TurboTax data.
I'm actually puzzled that there aren't about fifty different posters in this thread. I was hoping to find some cool new ideas too.
posted by jgreco at 6:29 AM on January 2, 2017 [1 favorite]
Hey all - I am in the same predicament as the OP, in that I have been using Paperless but it's proven super-buggy over time. Yesterday I discovered this Mac OS X app and am happy to report that it seems to be a good and stable alternative to Paperless: https://www.receipts-app.com/
The only downside I can find so far is it doesn't seem to have Scansnap integration, but I'm hoping that will be forthcoming as it's a relatively young app. In the meantime, I just scan into an 'Inbox' folder in Dropbox which I clear out at the end of each workday (depositing any receipt scans to the app). This is fine as I've started using Scanbot on the iPhone to scan receipts on-the-go, which deposits the scans into this folder as well.
posted by General Zubon at 9:35 AM on January 16, 2017
The only downside I can find so far is it doesn't seem to have Scansnap integration, but I'm hoping that will be forthcoming as it's a relatively young app. In the meantime, I just scan into an 'Inbox' folder in Dropbox which I clear out at the end of each workday (depositing any receipt scans to the app). This is fine as I've started using Scanbot on the iPhone to scan receipts on-the-go, which deposits the scans into this folder as well.
posted by General Zubon at 9:35 AM on January 16, 2017
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The app isn't super-intelligent, doesn't do OCR or anything like that, but can be location-aware and tries to be moderately helpful. The app by itself doesn't even try to trim the captured image, so I actually have a workflow that captures receipts in a different app (CamScanner), which trims the image, saves it to the camera roll, and then when entering a receipt in the Quicken app, I use that camera roll image instead.
This is perfect because it means that receipt images are always kept with the financial records that are used to build the tax reports that we use to do taxes.
Downside: it's more puttering than I'd care to do at time of sale. And if you don't have unlimited data, it wants to send that receipt image over the cellular. Though supposedly the latest version might fix that.
Upside: because we don't blindly trust electronic transaction downloads from the bank, we still get to do full tracking and reconciliation of everything the way we'd like, without all the manual data entry every few weeks (instead substituting a minute or three at time of sale for each receipt).
posted by jgreco at 10:36 AM on December 31, 2016