After 4 hours of sorting receipts, I changed my mind about spreadsheets

I used to think Excel was fine for tracking business expenses, but last month I spent an entire Sunday (seriously, 4 hours) matching credit card charges to paper receipts for my Q3 taxes. Switched to a simple app that scans receipts with my phone camera and automatically categorizes them. Has anyone else found a faster way to handle receipt tracking for quarterly estimates?

2 comments

2 Comments

lisab3213d ago

Got a small fire safe box and started throwing all my receipts in there by month. Sounds dumb but it Actually works better than any app I've tried. I used to do the whole scanning thing but then I'd forget to actually upload the scans for weeks. Now I just grab the whole stack once a quarter, dump them out, and sort by date. The physical pile forces me to deal with it instead of letting digital copies pile up in some cloud folder. Plus there's something satisfying about physically crossing off each receipt when I enter it into my spreadsheet.

craig.parker13d ago

Wait, how long does it actually take you to sort through a whole quarter's worth at once? I feel like that'd be a solid afternoon just sitting there with a stack of crumpled gas receipts and coffee shop slips lol. Been thinking about trying something like this myself but worried I'd just put it off even longer knowing there's a giant pile waiting.