Record your expenses without those pesky paper receipts

Here is a practical alternative to keeping all those little receipts for your expenses/taxman.

1. Set yourself up an Evernote account (it's free).  More about Evenote in my earlier post here.
2. Add your Evernote email address to your mobile phone (to find the email address in Evernote look at: settings, account summary)
3. When you get a receipt, take its photo and email it from your phone to your Evernote account (test a few first - my first photos of small receipts were blurred because I had the camera too close to the paper).

Those are the 'must do' steps.  For extra security and ease of searching, I suggest the following extras:

1. In Evernote, set up a separate note book for your receipts and periodically drag your receipts there.  This will allow you to easily share your receipts with others (accountant/taxman) when you need to.
2. It's better to scan your receipts as soon as you can (not in big batches).  As well as reducing the chance of you losing them, it means that the dates will be more meaningful, which will help if you need to retrieve one later.

Notes for the future

The solution proposed above is the electronic version of putting the envelopes in a big envelope.

What would be even better would be a way of dynamically linking these scanned images to a cloud based accounting system, so that you could drill down from profit and loss account, to transaction list, to transaction, to scanned receipt.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but so far that is not available for personal/SME users.

Security

Many people distrust computers in case they lose the data.  If you have Evernote installed on your PC, you have a second life: you have a local copy on your machine as well as the copy in the cloud that you can get from any web connected computer (or phone), with your password.

Comparison of cloud based accounting systems

This link will take you to a comparison of cloud based accounting systems.  For medium sized businesses they look good value but for small businesses some still look pricey.  I aim to add further details as I find them and would be interested to hear of any other web based systems that people may wish to recommend.