Running any kind of business requires keeping track of expenses. The Tax Man should not be the only person interested in what you are spending your money on. You should be, too.
It’s great to have money flowing into your bank account from your flips, wholesale deals and rentals. It’s another thing if all that money is flowing out the door in expenses. At the end of the day, we all want to keep as much money as we can.
Analyze those expenses. Ask yourself questions like:
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Where are my biggest expenses?
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Which properties are the most profitable and which are the least?
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Am I using the right vendors (contractors, stores, Realtors, title agents etc.)?
The trouble is, you only have so much time in your day. If you spend all that time organizing your receipts, scanning them into digital format and typing them into your accounting software, you may not have time to do the important analysis.
Spend Your Time More Profitably
Of course you can hire an assistant or an accountant to organize your finances for you. But, that could get expensive.
Why not let technology become your assistant? Head on over to the Shoeboxed website and check out what they have to offer.
Shoeboxed wants to organize your receipts to save you time for more profitable activities. It also makes it easy for you or your accountant to file your taxes.
All Shoeboxed really needs from you is to take a picture of your receipts using the Shoebox app from the App Store or Google Play for Android. You can also scan receipts in using any scanner.
Or you can just gather your receipts up and snail mail them in to Shoeboxed. Shoeboxed can provide you with prepaid envelopes or you can send them in using your own envelopes. Which envelopes you choose depends on which pricing plan you select.
Once you upload your receipts to Shoeboxed, you can see them in your dashboard.
Shoeboxed’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software can pull out certain information from the receipt:
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The vendor
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The amount of the purchase
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The date of purchase
Shoeboxed can also figure out what category of spending the receipt is based on that information and automatically organize receipts into the categories you set up.
Take a photo of the receipt on your phone when you are at the checkout counter using the Shoeboxed app. Then throw the receipt away because Shoeboxed can do the rest.
If you receive receipts in your Gmail account, you can have Shoebox scan the account automatically and pull out those receipts. That way, you never have a receipt get buried below other emails you receive later.
For other email addresses, you can just send receipts to Shoeboxed by forwarding them to [email protected]. It’s easy to set up an IFTTT Recipe or create an email rule to automatically forward receipts from certain email addresses.
When you email in your receipts, put any notes about the receipt in the subject line of your email. Shoeboxed automatically takes what is in the subject line and converts it to notes about the receipt.
What Else Can Shoeboxed Do For Me?
Now that you have all your receipts listed in Shoeboxed, you still need to load the numbers into your accounting software.
Shoeboxed has you covered there as well. They have partnered with a whole bunch of different software companies to make the data entry process as easy as possible. You can read the details about each company they use and how they work here.
For a quick summary (or click the link for videos) of some of the more popular ones:
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Quickbooks - You can send all your receipts in by mail in prepaid envelopes (or your envelopes) and Shoeboxed will enter them for you.
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Evernote – Set up ‘Auto Archiving’ in Shoeboxed under ‘Settings,’ and all receipts will be automatically sent to Evernote.
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Xero – Connect directly from Xero to have Shoebox import all receipt data directly into your Xero accounting and business software.
Shoeboxed is not just a receipt tracker. It really can help simplify your business life. Two other features Shoeboxed provides include business card and mileage tracking.
Shoeboxed uses the same OCR capability it had for receipts to scan all your business cards. After it extracts all the information from the card, Shoeboxed creates an online database of all your contacts. You can then export the information to:
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Your favorite email client contact list
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Whatever you are using for your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software (your lead generator for deals), or
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A CSV (basically an Excel file) file that you can upload anywhere
The Tax Man will be happy to see documentation of all your mileage (or unhappy to see how many deductions you will be taking) with a GPS feature on the Shoeboxed app.
When you start your trip, you just tap ‘Start Trip’ on the app. After you arrive at your destination, tap ‘Stop Trip.’ It’s as simple as that.
Shoeboxed will keep track of your mileage and will even keep track of the route you drove. Other information it will track about your trip includes:
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Date of the trip
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Ability to name the trip
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Deductible rate information
It will be hard for the IRS to dispute this mileage information if you use it right.
Tracking the Shoeboxed Receipt – How Much Does It Cost?
Like many different web services, there is a free plan for Shoeboxed, and several paid plans. Obviously the more you pay, the better service you get.
The free plan doesn’t give you much – just 5 documents a month that they will scan automatically. Most people have more than five bills just in their personal life.
You can still use their mileage, their business card capability (once you have entered them in) and their interfacing-with-accounting software. Load the receipts into Shoeboxed and enter the data yourself.
Using one of the paid plans gives you a much higher number of documents to scan. You will just have to figure out which plan is right for you.
Look at it this way, though, if you pick their ‘Classic’ plan and you save two hours per month, Shoeboxed has more than paid for itself.
Being successful in any venture involves concentrating your time on the most profitable activities. We can pretty much assure you that data entry is not one of them.
Your Take?
Would you pay for this service? Have you already? Tell us your thoughts below.
Spend Your Time Wisely – What else in your life could you automate with technology? What else is preventing you from doing more profitable deals?
Perform Analysis – Dig deep into your expenses. Where are you spending the most money? Then make those categories your main focus to reduce them.
Look at ROI, Not Just Expenses – If you are spending money on something, but it is saving you a whole lot of money compared to another way of doing it, or making you money – consider that money well spent!
JP Moses
is a real estate investor in Memphis, TN, with experience ranging from land lording to note buying, rehabbing, and wholesaling. However, wholesaling is the area that he enjoys most and where he bring the most experience and expertise to his students.