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.

But what if you’re a small business owner or solopreneur? If your business is small or you’re just getting started, it can be difficult to plan a monthly budget. You may be spending more money than you’re making, and if you’re like most small business owners, you may be pouring a lot of your own financial resources into growing your business.

Even if your budget is different every single month, you can still benefit by using a monthly expense worksheet to track spending, income, write-offs, and payments.

Step 1 – Organize

The first important thing you should do is get organized. Billfolds, filing cabinets and paper clipped stacks of receipts might work for some people, but there is a big chance you could lose an important piece of paper, and nobody has time for that!

One of the best things you can do is scan your receipts, bills and other paper documents so that there is always a digital record of them. An even easier option is using a service that can extract the data for you and export it right into an excel document.

Step 2 – Do the Work

The process of actually making your monthly expense worksheet and doing it well is essential for managing your budget time and time again. So, pull up that spreadsheet and get started!

There are two key categories you’ll need: fixed and variable costs. Once you have these, you can carry the fixed costs over to your expenses worksheet each month and change the variable costs as needed. Remember to cross reference the information in your worksheet with your online checking and banking accounts to verify that everything is correct. Also, check to make sure that the OCR technology from your scanning equipment got everything right. Some scanners only claim accuracy rates of 85%, so ensure that no decimals are transfixed!

Now that you have a spreadsheet template that you can use going forward, you’ll have no problem completing the final step.

Step 3 – Repeat (and don’t get lazy!)

The last step involves simply getting into the habit of managing your monthly expenses. The best way to do this is to add it to your schedule and to hold yourself accountable. Put a date on your calendar each month where you devote a few hours to scanning your receipts. Some people choose to break it up and scan weekly to keep their monthly expense reports in order while others need only do it monthly. Either way, doing this will eliminate the need for a bookkeeper (and as a result, some of those monthly fixed costs!).

Keep in mind that scanning your receipts is a much faster and more reliable solution than paper clipping receipts together and manually entering them into your accounting software. If you’re not using a scanner yet and are considering it, keep an eye out for receipt scanners and scanning services around tax time. Many companies will promote special offers to business owners to get them to buy their products while they’re prepping to file their taxes.

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.

It’s difficult enough to keep track of what you’re spending, let alone what your employees are spending! When multiple people start spending company money, organization is absolutely essential for making sure everyone gets paid back swiftly and all funds are accurately tracked for tax purposes.

Expense reimbursements may be required when employees run errands, shop for supplies, travel to meetings outside of the office, attend conferences, take clients to lunch, take the company car to be serviced, stay overnight at a hotel, book airfare, take a cab, rent a car, and more.

Luckily, many of the expenses you’ll be required to reimburse double as tax write-offs for you as the small business owner. Because of this, keeping track of your small business expense reimbursements is crucial to saving money come tax season.

Gone are the days of paper expense reporting, where employees had to manually fill out spreadsheets, submit stacks of stapled receipts, and wait weeks to be paid back. With receipt scanning services like those available from Shoeboxed, your employees can now instantly upload their receipts to a single, cloud-based account. Within that account, they can edit individual expenses, categorize their spending with customized labels, and create one-click expense reports.

Shoeboxed is especially useful during travel. If your employees are out of town for a conference, they can simply snap a picture of each receipt they receive with their smartphone. The Shoeboxed app instantly digitizes the data from each receipt and uploads it to your company account. You can track spending in real time, and your employees can recycle their receipts instead of bringing piles of paper back to clutter up the office.

When your employees are ready to be reimbursed, they can log in to their Shoeboxed account, select all of the applicable receipts, and generate an instant expense report. From there, they can download the report as a spreadsheet or PDF and email it to you for swift processing.

Once you receive your employee’s expense report, you’ll be able to evaluate individual items and track spending based on date, location, and category. If you have a question or need more information about an individual receipt, simply log in to your Shoeboxed account and search by the receipt’s date, category, or keyword.

Once you’ve approved all of the expenses that need to be reimbursed, it’s easy to pay your employees back. Services like Expense Pay allow you to instantly transfer funds from your business bank account to your employee’s personal account with the click of a button. Instead of waiting for payroll to clear, your employees can rest assured that they’ll be reimbursed for out-of-pocket expenses quickly and accurately.

With cloud-based services like those available from Shoeboxed and Expense Pay, staying on top of your small business expense reimbursements is a snap!

Tracking your spending doesn’t have to be this stressful chore though! You can prepare yourself for how much you will probably spend every month and build in a cushion for unexpected expenses. We’ve compiled an easy-to-follow guide for how to create and organize your monthly expenses worksheet to help you stay on top of your budget.

Worksheet Structure

For your worksheet, you want to create a column that outlines your expected budget and a column for what you actually spent during any given month. Your initial worksheet calculations might be off, but don’t worry about it. You can always adjust your budget once you start diligently tracking your monthly spending habits.

The first thing you want to do when tracking your monthly spending is divide all costs into fixed expenses and flexible expenses to be entered into your monthly expenses worksheet.

Fixed Expenses

A fixed expense is anything you pay regularly to meet your basic needs. These expenses occur every single month without fail. Rent or mortgage, life, health and car insurance all fall under this category.

Find an average amount for a bill that might have a small variance from month to month (like electricity). A copy of your last year’s annual bill will help you come up with a reasonable idea of what to expect on a monthly basis. If you can’t find last year’s bill, it might be a good idea to look into buying a scanner or start using a scanning service so all your bills are saved digitally. This is a foolproof way to ensure that all your bills and receipts are saved online.

It’s also a smart idea to include savings under fixed expenses, this way you’ll be setting some money aside every month, without fail.

Flexible Expenses

After examining your monthly fixed expenses, move on to flexible (or variable) expenses. A flexible expense is an item or activity that might not occur every month, but instead every couple of months. It can also be a spending area where you can control how much and when you spend. Groceries, meals eaten out, clothing, recreation and medical expenses are all examples of flexible expenses.

Variable cost is an area where you can compensate if you go over your budget in another area. Try skipping that extra meal out a week or carpooling to work to cut down on these expenses.

With these easy steps to creating your monthly expenses worksheet, you will always know how much you should (or more realistically – are) spending per month.

Do you have any tips you would like to share for tracking or cutting down on your expenses? We would love to hear them!

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”?