If you’re in business or if you have a lot of expenses that you could possibly write off, you know you’ve had to deal with tracking expenses in many different ways. Most of us try to keep our receipts, which can be problematic because you could have tons, and they’re easy to lose. Therefore, here are some ideas you might want to think about to help with the process.
First, if you have a smartphone you can think about taking pictures of your receipts. These can be transferred to your computer electronically and you can create folders to put them in. Even if you lost your phone, you probably have your backup program set up to move everything to the cloud every night, so you’d be able to recover them pretty easily.
Second, pick one credit card and use it for all of your business expenses. This way, even if you miss receipts you’ll have a record of your purchases all in one place. Some accountants would rather look at your credit card statements anyway, and if you decide to use your business debit card they can use your statement to help track your money for the year as well.
Third, you can still get receipts but either scan them all when you get home or purchase a receipt scanner, which will also turn all of your receipts into electronic files. This is nice and clean and, if you use one of those receipt scanners, you can categorize everything so that your accountant more easily knows where everything should go. Of course the problem with this one is you have to find the time to scan everything, because few people get home and immediately scan.
Those are some ideas you might not have thought of. If none of those work for you… at least put all of your receipts in one place so you’re not chasing them all over the house, especially your big purchases. 😉
