Save me from keeping a shoebox of expense receipts and manual calculations

[TripleB]

I'm looking for suggestions on how to manage my small business expenses (things like petrol and officeworks receipts). My business doesn't have any size or sophistication to it - heck my accounting software is a DIY excel spreadsheet (although the forthcoming ATO requirements will probably mean that I will have to join 2018 sooner rather than later).

I basically just put all the incidental expenses on my personal credit card and put the receipts in my wallet and then into a shoe box to be manually totted up (by me) a couple of times a year. I'm quite sure that I lose receipts and in the process I'm using taxed personal money for business expenses.

Does anyone have any suggestions about which of the various apps out there (receipt bank, shoeboxes, expensify, averse and others?) which might be helpful? I would probably have about 10 receipts a month - so I'm kind of leaning towards expensify because it won't cost me anything for less than 10 monthly scans.

All suggestions appreciated.

 

[CaptJCool]

I'm looking for suggestions on how to manage my small business expenses (things like petrol and officeworks receipts). My business doesn't have any size or sophistication to it - heck my accounting software is a DIY excel spreadsheet (although the forthcoming ATO requirements will probably mean that I will have to join 2018 sooner rather than later).

I basically just put all the incidental expenses on my personal credit card and put the receipts in my wallet and then into a shoe box to be manually totted up (by me) a couple of times a year. I'm quite sure that I lose receipts and in the process I'm using taxed personal money for business expenses.

Does anyone have any suggestions about which of the various apps out there (receipt bank, shoeboxes, expensify, averse and others?) which might be helpful? I would probably have about 10 receipts a month - so I'm kind of leaning towards expensify because it won't cost me anything for less than 10 monthly scans.

All suggestions appreciated.

Or you could just use the ATO app. It has A photograph your receipt and record function

 

[Pushka]

I'm looking for suggestions on how to manage my small business expenses (things like petrol and officeworks receipts). My business doesn't have any size or sophistication to it - heck my accounting software is a DIY excel spreadsheet (although the forthcoming ATO requirements will probably mean that I will have to join 2018 sooner rather than later).

I basically just put all the incidental expenses on my personal credit card and put the receipts in my wallet and then into a shoe box to be manually totted up (by me) a couple of times a year. I'm quite sure that I lose receipts and in the process I'm using taxed personal money for business expenses.

Does anyone have any suggestions about which of the various apps out there (receipt bank, shoeboxes, expensify, averse and others?) which might be helpful? I would probably have about 10 receipts a month - so I'm kind of leaning towards expensify because it won't cost me anything for less than 10 monthly scans.

All suggestions appreciated.

You always need to keep receipts in one form or another so other than a more sophisticated shoebox I don’t think that’s the ‘lost’ issue. You could scan them and save them to a cloud? Takes time though.

I use MYOB live. Online and the accountant accesses it online as well. Most of our expenses are in emails so they are in our cloud. But the other receipts eg Officeworks - are kept in an IKEA box. Each financial year its closed and sent to storage and eventually shredded after a few years.

I really dislike that the ATO has brought in so many ‘big boy’ rules that mean small businesses have to keep increasing the time they spend on non productive activities with no thought given to that cost burden.

 

[VPS]

If you dropbox it has an app on your phone that you can photograph a receipt and save it in a folder in the cloud and then throw it away. You don't have to have had copies of receipts.

 

[love_the_life]

Our business used to use a spreadsheet plus ATO application (which was great but now suoerceded and so not available). The paperwork required was one of the reasons we decided to close the company and properly retire. As well the income was classed as PSI.
Used to hate MYOB!

 

[kookaburra75]

If you dropbox it has an app on your phone that you can photograph a receipt and save it in a folder in the cloud and then throw it away. You don't have to have had copies of receipts.

If you are using the Office365 suite for Word/Excel etc, there is a phone app called OfficeLens. You can take a photo of a receipt, it squares it up and you can crop it, and then save it to the OneDrive folder where it puts the date & time into the file name. You can then access that on your computer and move it around into a folder for that month. It works quite well for us.

 

[Dr Bob]

My accountant uses Bank Link for my business account for income & expenses that can't be paid by CCs. Haven't written a cheque in I don't know how long. My CCs (4 of then) are all personal & used for both personal & business ( 25 to 30K a month) Amex is the preferred. The Bank Link comes out coded & I apply those codes to the CC statements. All receipts go in the "shoe box" for the 3 month BAS cycle & it takes me about 10 minutes a day for bill payments etc & about 1 hr every 3 months for the coding. Never pay anything for business with cash.
Works well for me particularly with the points harvest.

 

[Peter D]

I use Microsoft Money sunset edition.

You can set your own categories rather than use the Americanised defaults.

It gives me more types of reports than I will ever need.

I churn credit cards and always have a number overlapping. I just download the data each week and the reports add the different accounts together.

Haven’t had to reconcile an account for years, if all items are kosher and the downloaded MS balance is the same as the bank balance.

But I don’t think it comes as an app only as windows software for the computer. But then I have better things to do when I am out and about.

For receipts I just scan them into a special folder until needed.