Having good record keeping is important for any business. Receipts are important to keep for many reasons, but keeping track of physical receipts can be tough. Finding receipts in the future can be impossible if you don’t have a good system for keeping receipts. In this episode of MissionBusinessPodcast.com Bernard Roesch shares a better way to manage receipts for your business.
If you have any questions about this podcast episode, please feel free to contact us.
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Why You Need to Keep Receipts
Keeping your receipts is important for a few reasons.
- First, you might need to review details about an expense yourself that is not clear from a credit card statement.
- Having the original receipt enables you to see a lot more detail about the transaction.
- If you are audited for taxes, receipts may be needed to prove that an expense is truly a business expense.
- If you don’t have detailed records to prove Expenses>Business Expenses, this can lead to lost tax savings and potential tax penalties.
Manually Storing Receipts
There are a number of different ways to keep track of your receipts, but one that many business owners use is manually storing receipts as physical documents.
While this does accomplish the goal of keeping receipts, it can be challenging to find specific receipts if you need to look back on one in the future. You may be able to store them according to the time of year when the expense took place. But other than that, sorting and finding specific receipts can be nearly impossible.
Scanning Receipts to Your Computer
Instead of keeping physical copies of receipts, you can periodically scan receipts and store them on your computer. While this does eliminate the need for physical copies of receipts, the challenge of finding specific receipts is still not solved.
You can store the receipts in separate folders on your computer by date, but you will still need to manually review them to find a specific receipt.
Use A Receipt Management App
There are a number of different tools available that you can use to make keeping and finding receipts much easier. For example, many apps will allow you to do the following:
- Scan receipts from your phone – By using a mobile app, you can take a picture of a receipt immediately after the purchase or at a later time to convert the physical copy of the receipt to a digital version.
- Automatically document expense details – The receipt management app uses the picture to note specific details about each transaction. For example, it can automatically log the date of the transaction, the company associated with the transaction and much more.
- Automatically connect to credit card transactions – Some receipt management apps enable you to automatically connect a receipt that has been scanned to a transaction on your credit card statement. This makes it easier to keep track of which receipt is for which expense.
- Easily search and find receipts – By having receipts stored digitally using a system that is designed to catalog receipts, you can easily search through these receipts in the future to find a specific receipt you need to review.
There are a number of different receipt management apps available, but Expensify.com is a great app to try.
We Can Help You
If you need help getting a receipt tracking process in place or other accounting best practices, contact Bernard today.
You can also visit MissionBusinessPodcast.com for more insights that Bernard has been sharing with us in the previous episodes.
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