How to Use Your Smartphone to Organize Receipts
Most of us have figured out some elaborate system involving folders and paper clips (or maybe a trough and shovel) to organize receipts. But now with these new-fangled inventions, you can make the receipt sludge pile a thing of the past.
Yay! We live in the future with matter duplicators, instant teleportation, and a free, money-less society in which the world’s abundance is shared with all who need it. No … We don’t … Just kidding! And in our world of scarcity, the 1,500 families that own everything want to make sure than no one ever has anything they’re not supposed to. So when we travel, go on work lunches, or buy stuff that’s deductible, refundable, or returnable, we have all kinds of receipts to collect and take care of. Eight years ago, I did a ground-breaking episode that disrupted how the world manages receipts. That was in the pre-cell phone era, however.
Listener Giles Bartlett wrote in and asked me, “In the 21st century world, how do I organize receipts?” Wise, observant Giles! Thank you for pointing out this additional opportunity to completely disrupt receipt management. As the Get-It-Done Guy, I must rise to the challenge. If smartphones have changed the game, then once again we must Win The Game and wrangle all receipts into submission! Bwah hah hah hah hah! (I haven’t had my coffee yet this morning.)
Your new receipt-wrangling toolkit: Your smartphone camera and PDF technology to capture and store receipts.
Get a Scanner App and Capture Receipts
Get a scanner app. This is different from just a photograph app. When photograph a document with your phone, it’s different than making a photocopy. Photos can come out too yellow, the words might not be so clear, and the cropping might be off. A scanner app is an app that’s designed to fix these problems. You want a scanner app that’s designed to sharpen the photo, make it black and white, remove extra shadows, and correct the shape of the image if it was taken at an angle or distorted somehow. It’s also nice to have one that lets you adjust the compression of the scanned receipts, so you can choose the tradeoff between image quality and file size.
You also want a scanner app that will organize your receipts in ways your photo stream will not.
There are scanner apps that can consolidate multiple photos into a single document. If your receipts or documents are confidential, you can password protect what you scan. The scanner app I use is Readdle’s Scanner Pro, which has all of these features and more…
Write the Category on the Paper Receipt
When you get a receipt, write directly on the receipt which category it should be placed in. If it’s a meal, write down “meal,” who you’re with, and what you talked about. If it’s the Motel Six bill for your annual trip to the “Advances in Fungus Fertilization Techniques” convention, write “lodging, mushrooms” on the receipt. When it’s time to submit the receipts to your corporate masters (or to your governmental masters if it’s a tax-related receipt), you’ll know exactly what to do with them.
Organize Scanned Receipts
Next take a picture of the receipt you just categorized. Since you chose a scanner app with this capability, add all receipts to a single document. I have several receipt documents going at once. I have a general monthly document where that month’s receipts go. At the end of the month, I send it to my bookkeeper.
Your new receipt-wrangling toolkit: Your smartphone camera and PDF technology to capture and store receipts.
If I’m on a specific business trip, I often create a document just for that trip: “Fungus Conference.” This is especially useful for international trips where there are currency conversion issues. My bookkeeper can simply know that those receipts might require special treatment.
Since you’ve already written down the categories on every receipt, you can easily flip through and see what’s what.
Use Cover Pages
If you have different documents full of receipts, they’re easy to confuse. So when you’re inside a document, write what that document is on the back of a napkin. Snap a picture, and voila—you now have a page that you can use as a cover sheet for the document. Just write “APRIL RECEIPTS” in big letters on the cover sheet you photograph, and when you send the document to the expense people, they’ll know exactly what’s there.
When it’s time to do the sending, just export your receipt collection as a PDF and email it to your bookkeeper. But be safe!! Use an app that lets you password-protect your exported PDF, so it never has to travel over the interwebs without protection. The interwebs is a dangerous, evil place. Always assume someone is spying on any and everything you send to anyone ever anywhere. Because they are.
Include Summaries
If you need to total your receipts by category before sending them, once again, you can just do that on the back of a napkin. As you did for the title page, write down the total receipt amounts for each category, snap a picture of the summary sheet, and rearrange it to be the second page in the document.
Well, Listener Giles, I hope that now you understand how your smartphone changes everything, even while it changes nothing. Technology marches on, giving us grand new ways to be enslaved to our never-changing shadowy overlords. I mean, isn’t technology great!?!? Now the 1,500 families can feel safe and secure that no one has what they don’t deserve, more efficiently than ever before. Because using your scanner app to create cover pages, expense category summaries, and images of receipts will make organizing your receipts a snap. No more chains that bind us through plastic baggies full of crumpled pieces of paper. Now, our chains can also play Candy Crush. And if that isn’t progress, I don’t know what is.
This is Stever Robbins. Follow Get-It-Done Guy on Twitter and Facebook. I run webinars and other programs to help people be Extraordinarily Productive, and build extraordinary careers. If you want to know more, visit SteverRobbins.com/
Work Less, Do More, and Have a Great Life!
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
