Scanning Receipts with Shoeboxed

Shoeboxed’s Services

Receipts are necessary for tracking expenses, as well as claiming deductions on your taxes. But managing all those little slips of paper can be a problem. That’s where Shoeboxed comes in: if you send the company your receipts via mail, Shoeboxed will scan them in and provide you the information online. Shoeboxed goes one step beyond standard scanning, as well. The company’s system extracts information like the date and vendor from each receipt — and from the web, you can export your information in a format that you can use with Quickbooks or or other bookkeeping software in your home office.

Shoeboxed provides its customers with unique blue envelopes to mail in receipts; whether you receive your receipts back after they’ve been scanned is just a question of which plan you choose. While you can have them returned, you can also arrange for Shoeboxed to shredd and recycle your receipts. In addition to scanning receipts, Shoeboxed provides an identical service for business cards: you still get online access to your information, but rather than having it formatted for bookkeeping software, it’s set up so that you can easily add the information from scanned business cards to your address book.

The online interface for accessing the receipts you have had scanned enables you to add annotations and categories. It can also automatically categorize receipts based on your settings: if, for instance, all of your meetings at a particular restaurant were business expenses, you can set the system to automatically identify them as such.

The Plans

Shoeboxed offers tiered services to its customers, with effectively three different options. Each option comes with a free trial, and you can receive a dscount if you sign up for a full year’s service, rather than a monthly subscription. The ‘Lite’ plan is priced at $9.95. With it, you can send Shoeboxed 50 receipts or business cards to be scanned each month and, as long as you choose an annual plan, you can send in an additional 250 receipts to get yourself caught up. The ‘Classic’ plan — priced at $19.95 — will accept 150 receipts per month and allows for 500 catch-up receipts. The ‘Business’ version of Shoeboxed is $49.95: you can have 500 business cards or receipts scanned, along with an additional 1,000 catch-up receipts.

There is, in fact, a free version of Shoeboxed available, but it does not allow for any scanned receipts. With it you can enter receipts by hand, or forward email receipts to your account. The ability to email an unlimited number of receipts to your account is included with all levels of Shoeboxed. You can also purchase a backup CD at any time.