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.

Xero Personal - Cloud Accounting software

Xero has come up with a competitive price for their cloud based personal accounting software (£24 a year).  That's the good news.

The bad news is that the only way to get your data into their system is to download bank statements.  This gives me 2 problems - one technical and one more fundamental.  Technically, my main bank (Smile, part of the Co-Op) does not support export in the right format.  The bigger problem is that it only allows you to put your history into their system.  Call me forward thinking but I see accounting systems as ways of looking into the future not just recording the past.  If the system cannot let me take into account my known outgoings to see if I will have enough money in the right accounts in the future, it's not really doing the basics.

To be fair, their web site says that they are'working on' adding manual transactions, so this may be worth watching for the future - especially if they maintain this price point.  To me, having an inexpensive personal accounting product is a really good way to raise their profile and then introduce people to their business editions.  But if the personal system can't cope with personal banking, it makes you wonder if the business version will do the business...