Digital receipts are also extremely beneficial for the environment, and may even protect you from cancer! That’s because some of the chemicals used to make paper receipts have been shown to cause cancer in lab rats – yikes!

Save money, save time, save the planet, and protect your health. Not too shabby, right?

Here are seventeen of the top benefits of scanning receipts and going digital:

17. When you go digital, there will be no more paper clutter in your car, wallet, purse, home, or office. You’ll be able to stay organized and get back to doing what’s most important to you.

16. A digital receipt will let you instantly track your expenses with receipt scanner software and cut time spent doing your taxes in half.

15. Protect yourself from harmful BPA, the chemical found in paper receipts that’s been shown to cause cancer in lab rats. Every time you touch a paper receipt, you’re exposed to this chemical. Switching to digital receipts will reduce your risk of exposure significantly.

14. Reduce the amount of paper being dumped into landfills each year. According to Will Hines, writing in the Huffington Post, paper receipts account for 1.5 billion tons of waste annually in the United States alone. That’s 10 million trees cut down, a billion gallons of water and over a quarter of a billion gallons of oil used. In the UK, 11 billion receipts are printed each year.

13. Capture receipts while you’re on the go by using receipt scanning apps for your smartphone.

12. Create one-click expense reports with your receipt scanning software’s reporting tool. You’ll never have to staple a stack of receipts to a hard copy expense report again.

11. Organize your receipts by category to get an instant snapshot of your spending.

10. Instantly upload your digital receipt to your application in real time, ensuring that each and every expense is tracked and your accounts are up to date.

9. Save money on costly printer ink and paper by going paperless in your office and at home.

8. Share your information with your accountant or tax professional with the click of a button.

7. If you ever need to find a receipt for tax purposes, it’s as easy as searching by date or keyword within your receipt scanning account.

6. If the IRS requires you to produce a receipt, you can simply print it out and submit it.

5. You can create digital receipts while working off-site by using a portable digital receipts scanner made for travel.

4. Going paperless extends beyond receipts. Most receipt scanner software will also scan bank statements, itineraries, budgets, or any other documents that need to be digitized.

3. Digital receipts lead to a more organized, clutter-free office, which in turn improves productivity in the workplace.

2. Thermal paper receipts are not recyclable, making e-receipts more important than ever for making a positive impact on the environment.

1. When you ask for an emailed receipt or snap a picture of a receipt with your smartphone, you’ll enjoy the feeling of a more organized personal environment and a more sustainable environment for everyone.

In the past few years, a variety of new software has been developed to help individuals and business owners track and manage their expenses using digital receipts and receipt scanning software. Here are our top 5 ways to use tech tools to track your spending:

1. Consider going paperless

The #1 reason people make mistakes tracking their expenses, or forget to include lucrative write-offs on their taxes, is because they’re still using hard copy methods. Paper receipts and reports get lost, misplaced, smudged, and torn. Not to mention the damage they do to the environment. Going paperless will make all of your expenses instantly searchable within your chosen software application.

2. Get receipt scanning software

Speaking of software, there are some amazing programs out there to help you track your business expenses quickly and easily. One of our favorites is a cloud-based software application called Shoeboxed.

Shoeboxed turns all of your paper clutter into digitized receipts, no matter how buried your office is! When you sign up, you’ll get a bunch of “Magic Envelopes” in the mail. Just toss your paper clutter, including receipts, bank statements, and whatever else you’ve got, into the envelopes. When Shoeboxed receives them, they will scan and digitize all of your receipts for you and upload the data to your secure account. You’ll then be able to get an instant snapshot of all your business expenses, assign them categories, and create one-click expenses reports.

3. Create one-click expense reports

Gone are the days of passing around a hard copy spreadsheet from employee to employee, or stapling receipt after receipt to a smudged piece of paper. Using your chosen receipt scanning software, you’ll be able to create an instant report of expenses based on category, date range, or whatever criteria you want.

4. Put your smartphone to work

Track expenses while you’re traveling for business, on your way to a meeting, or working abroad. The Shoeboxed app for iOS and Android lets you snap pictures of receipts and instantly upload them to your cloud-based account. This way, you won’t accumulate paper clutter in your wallet, purse, or car, and you’ll keep your account updated in real time.

5. Be consistent

The easiest way to keep track of your business expenses is by being consistent. Mobile receipt scanning software makes it easy to scan receipts and track expenses any time of day or night, wherever you happen to be. Since it only takes a second or two to scan a receipt, there’s no excuse to let the paper clutter build up!

Keeping track of your expenses and sharing them with your tax professional will ensure the highest refund come tax time. It will also save you hours of time throughout the year and prevent reports and receipts from getting lost in the shuffle.

Flash forward to 2013, when cloud-based accounting software has made it easier than ever to track expenses, generate reports, and create budgets – all without ever having to hit the print button.

The key to creating a flawless expense report is to accurately track your expenses. If you have a solid system in place, generating a report based on those tracked expenses is an absolute breeze. Here are a few of our favorite ways to ensure accurate expense tracking:

Shoeboxed

In the above scenario, one of the biggest pains of creating hard copy expense reports was having to staple piles of receipts to the report itself. Well, no more!

Shoeboxed is a receipt scanning service that digitizes hard copy documents and maintains them in a cloud-based account that can be accessed from anywhere. Every individual receipt is transformed into a digital document that can be searched for by date, location, or individual item.

You can also keep track of receipts when you’re out of the office with the Shoeboxed app for iOS7 and Android. Snap a picture of each receipt and watch as your account is instantly updated with the new information.

When it’s time to create an expenses spreadsheet, Shoeboxed does it for you. Create one-click expense reports by selecting the applicable expenses within your Shoeboxed account. You can then download the spreadsheet, email it to your colleagues or employees for editing, or upload it to a secure, shared server.

Budgt

Budgt for iPhone is an app that lets you track your spending via virtual spreadsheets. This option is great for those concerned with privacy because Budgt doesn’t require any banking or other personal information. Simply buy the app for $0.99 and begin tracking expenses. You’ll have a handheld digital spreadsheet that will help you manage your finances and stick to your budget.

Freshbooks

On the other end of the spectrum, Freshbooks is cloud-based accounting software with the ability to link directly to your personal or business bank account. Freshbooks intuitively knows which items should be added to your expenses spreadsheet. It tracks income as well as expenditures, and displays the data on your account dashboard in the form of charming graphs and easy-to-read charts.

Freshbooks also offers a variety of reporting options that can be customized by client, invoice, expense category, profit and loss, and tax summaries. Simply click the “expense report” option to view and download an instant snapshot of your expenses for the month, quarter or year. You can also assign categories to certain expenses, making reporting come tax time a cinch!

Whichever application you choose to help create your weekly, yearly or monthly expense spreadsheet, the benefits of going digital are clear. So forget the paper print out and scrap the stapled mess – use Shoeboxed, Budgt, Freshbooks or the app of your choice to digitally track your expenses.

The benefits of capturing receipts via your smartphone or desktop scanner include:

Instant digitization

When you scan your receipts or snap a picture of them using a smartphone app like the one available from Shoeboxed, all of the information on the receipt becomes instantly digitized. This means that you’ll be able to search for purchases and transactions by date, amount, category, and even individual items. Cloud-based applications like Shoeboxed ensure that all of your expense information is available at the touch of a button.

Never lose another receipt

It’s easy to lose track of paper receipts when they’re stuffed in your wallet, purse or briefcase. By capturing your e-receipts and uploading them to the cloud as soon as you get them, you’ll never lose another receipt. You’ll also be able to search for and find receipts as needed when requested by your tax professional or the IRS.

Easy reporting

When the time comes to send information to your accountant or create an expense report, software that captures e-receipts makes the process seamless. Instead of shuffling through receipt after receipt and manually recording each total, simply select the date range or category of receipt you’d like to report, and voila! A comprehensive report created with the touch of a button.

Digitally sort into categories

Another major benefit of capturing your e-receipts is being able to sort and organize them into expense categories. Shoeboxed’s receipt scanning service automatically detects the appropriate tax category for each uploaded receipt.

For example, a scanned receipt from Office Depot would be automatically labeled as “office supplies,” and be available in searches for that particular expense category. If your purchase at Office Depot needs to be categorized differently, it’s easy to remove, edit, and change category labels from within your account.

Capture on the go

While a receipt scanner comes in handy at the office and when dealing with large stacks of paper, capturing receipts on the go prevents clutter from being reintroduced to your newly clean workspace.

When you receive a receipt from a retail outlet or restaurant, simply snap a picture of that receipt from within your smartphone application. The information will be instantly digitized and beamed to your account. From there, you can recycle the receipt and leave the establishment clutter-free. Since the IRS no longer requires hard copy receipts, the digital record is all you need to keep.

Eliminate stacks of paper clutter

Capturing your e-receipts in the office doesn’t have to be a painstaking process. Shoeboxed offers a service called the Magic Envelope, which allows you to eliminate enormous stacks of personal or business receipts and other paper documents in a matter of minutes. Simply toss anything you’d like to be captured into the big blue envelope, and toss the envelope in the mail. In a few days, the folks at Shoeboxed will have scanned and digitized each and every item.

Luckily, even Uncle Sam has decided to go paperless. The IRS now accepts digital receipts, which means that scanned receipts are now considered fully legitimate documentation for your taxes. Instead of collecting stacks of paper receipts in your wallet or “organizing” receipts with plastic sandwich bags, you can simply scan your receipts, upload them to a cloud-based receipt management account, and recycle those pesky pieces of paper once and for all.

Then, if you do need to pull a specific receipt for your accountant come tax time, you can simply open up or log in to your digital receipt account and either email them a screen shot of the receipt or print it out. Receipt scanning software like the programs available from Shoeboxed lets you search for receipts that have been placed into a receipt form digitized by date, amount, line item, or category.

With a Shoeboxed account, you can keep track of business receipts no matter where you are. Dump piles of paper receipts into their Magic Envelope and watch your entire office become clutter-free in a matter of minutes. The folks at Shoeboxed will actually scan your receipts for you, saving you the time and headache of scanning slip after slip of paper.

Neat Desktop Scanner

You can also scan business receipts yourself with a desktop scanner or mobile receipt scanner, or simply snap a picture of each individual receipt with your smartphone. This is a great option while traveling, and prevents receipts from getting lost in the shuffle as you head from the airport to the rental car agency to your hotel.

When you receive a receipt that can be expensed or used as a write off, simply snap a photo of it with your phone from within your account. The information from the receipt, including the items purchased, location, date, and total will be instantly uploaded to your online account.

When you return from your trip, need to generate an expense report, or need to file your taxes, simply log in to your cloud-based account and get an instant snapshot of your receipt totals. Each receipt can be categorized, labeled, and exported as a report to the email address of your choosing. You can also download reports and send them as attachments, streamlining the accounting process for you and your tax professional.

Digitizing every business receipt is a great way to get organized, save money, and save time throughout the year. By opting for digital instead of hard copy receipts, you’ll never have to worry about misplacing important financial documents or losing proofs of purchase. If you’re a small business owner, scanning digital receipts will streamline your entire accounting process, freeing you up to do what you do best – run your business!

Spreadsheets have always been the go-to method for managing business revenues and expenses. For years, tools like Microsoft Excel, FileMaker Pro and OpenOffice have been coveted financial management tools for small business owners looking to organize their finances.

The reason these tools remain relevant even today is because they make it very simple to add, filter and manipulate the data within them. Even with the advent of cloud based solutions like Google Docs, which allows multiple users to change data within spreadsheets in real time, there are lots of other tricks to make your business expense spreadsheet more functional and easier to manage.

One of the best things about spreadsheets is that almost all of the popular accounting programs allow you to export data into existing documents based on pre-set categories. Most of these accounting programs are integrated with Excel and Google Docs, which means all you have to do is click a button and instant business expense spreadsheets are generated on your computer. Many of them will also allow you to insert images of the documents alongside the cells of data to ensure that the information is correct. Just make sure if you are inserting images that your document does not become too cluttered.

(Courtesy of philliecasablanca)

The only problem with a traditional expenses spreadsheet is that it still requires you to manually enter the data you want to track (i.e. vendor, amount, card used, date, line expenses, etc.). While some of the accounting programs will extract the data for you, the best solution is to actually hold onto your receipts and scan them with an OCR system.

There are lots of services and scanners out there that will store your receipts and extract the data from them so you don’t have to. Most of these solutions will also extract information off of bills and invoices, which helps to give you an even more accurate view of your finances. Some services even allow you to generate instant expense reports from your cell phone so you can email them to your employer before you are even back from the business trip!

Here are some other tips for making a good business expense spreadsheet:

• Separate your Personal and Business Expenses: This one may seem obvious, but even one expense in the wrong place could completely throw off your budget tracking. If possible, try to use different cards for your different types of expenses. Sorting by payment method is a great way to separate personal expenses from business ones on a spreadsheet.
• Learn Simple Functions: Tracking your expenses is worthless if you can’t extrapolate the data. Learning how to add, multiply, subtract and divide the different rows and columns is very important for successful expense reporting. A good guide for learning these functions can be found here.
• Graph, Save, Email and Print: Similar to learning the functions, it is also important to learn how to make graphs of the data on your spreadsheets. Graphs are much more helpful for “seeing the big picture” and they are also more meaningful. I should also note that it is crucial for you to save, email and print your spreadsheets every month or even every week. Spreadsheets on programs like Microsoft Excel aren’t saved in the cloud so if your computer dies then you are out of luck.

When you’re trying to save money, build wealth, and manage your budget, it’s absolutely essential to have a free expense tracker to account for every hard-earned penny you spend.

The latest and greatest expense trackers manage all areas of your finances, whether you’re charting transactions on personal accounts or mapping the financial health of your small business.

Here are some of your options when it comes to expense tracking tools.

Spending Free

Spending Free, iPhone’s take on a free expense tracker app, gives you simple snapshots of your overall financial picture every time you open the application.

View your income in green, your expenses in blue, and compare the two in a dynamic interface that breaks up totals by the day, week, month, year, and lifetime.

This tracker is a great choice for goal-setting because it creates a clear picture of where you’ve been and how your income relates to your expenditures. After all, the first step to making significant changes in your finances is getting crystal clear about your situation as it now stands.

Expense Tracker

Expense Tracker turns your smartphone into a mobile bookkeeper. With its easy-to-use interface and shareability features, this app is the perfect choice for savvy entrepreneurs on the go.

Expense Tracker gives you control over how you manage each area of your expenses, which can be arranged and charted by date, quarter or category. Available for Android, this app intuits selections you’ve already entered, making the creation of labels and descriptions a breeze.

Freshbooks

You know and love Freshbooks for cloud-based accounting, but did you know that Freshbooks can also track your expenses?

Simply sync your Freshbooks account to your checking or savings account, and watch this intuitive program get down to business.

Once the application has access to your spending accounts, it automatically recognizes expenses, categorizes them, labels them, and creates an easy-to-read snapshot of your personal financial picture.

Each time you log in to your account, you’ll see expenses listed side by side with income and unpaid invoices, making it a snap to see where you’re overspending and where you can afford to indulge a bit.

Now that’s fresh!

Shoeboxed

Every time you receive a receipt and beam it to your Shoeboxed account, the expense is automatically labeled and digitally filed into a category predetermined by you.

Once you’re in the application, you can search, edit and export expenses associated with everything from business travel to office supplies.

Shoeboxed makes it easy to create expense reports in a variety of formats and share them with your co-workers, employer or tax professional. And since every receipt has been scanned and digitized, you can rest easy knowing that you have legally binding documentation of each and every expense.

Using a free expense tracker is the best way to take control of your financial health and continued growth as a small business owner or solopreneur.

As you track each expenditure, you’ll rest easy knowing that the application is saving you time and money by organizing each item into detailed lists and categories. When the time comes to submit your expense reports to your employer or accountant, you’ll be able to do so with the click of a button.

How did you used to track expenses before there was “an app for that”?