Check it out!

http://weeklyapp.tv/2009/10/episode-v-shoeboxed-removes-paper-clutter-gives-you-online-access-and-is-irs-friendly/

Shoeboxed users can automatically forward their receipts from online retailers to their Shoeboxed accounts, where important data like store name, total, and date are extracted with over 95% accuracy for budgeting, bookkeeping, reimbursements, and tax purposes. Receipts are also sorted into categories with the improved Auto-Categorization tool. With the new e-mail processing system, this free feature is now faster and has even more accurate data extraction than before so online shoppers can conveniently keep track of their purchases and spending with minimal effort and hassle.

By using their Shoeboxed e-mail address as their online shopping address, users can also avoid all the spam and marketing messages being sent by online retailers to their primary inboxes. Old online shopping receipts can simply be forwarded manually from a user’s inbox to their Shoeboxed address. Users can also scan paper receipts and upload them to their Shoeboxed accounts, helping to eliminate clutter and saving time during tax season.

“We just celebrated our second year of going online, and we thought this would be a great way to get back to our roots.” said Taylor Mingos, CEO and Founder of Shoeboxed. “We want to be able to provide a great free service for our DIY users to help them save money during the recession.”

Shoeboxed’s improved free DIY service will revolutionize online shopping by providing users with the ability to automatically categorize their receipts, store them in a secure online archive, maximize deductions and reimbursements, and save time and money on their bookkeeping.

Those who are interested in trying out Shoeboxed’s solutions for receipt and business card management should visit our website for more information at http://www.shoeboxed.com.

So what to give these kinds of Dads for Father’s Day? Give them the gift of time:

1) Regardless of whether you still live with your father, a classic gift is the Nasty Chore Coupon. Pick the chore your dad hates the most: cleaning the gutter? Power-washing the deck? Organizing the garage? Whatever it is, Dad will appreciate you offering to do it for him, saving him time and the psychological burden of a nasty chore. The plus side for you? It’s free!

2) In this day and age, it is perfectly acceptable (nay, even trendy) for men to get in touch with their nurturing feminine side. Try giving Dad a gift certificate for a massage or a pedicure (with clear nail polish!) Hard-working men deserve a little pampering and the opportunity to push the pause button on their busy lives. He may not know how much he loves a trip to the spa until he tries it.

3) And finally (enter shameless but justified plug here), giving Dad a subscription to Shoeboxed is like giving him the gift of time. Mail-in will save him hours of time trying to keep track of all his receipts and business cards, hours that he could be spending with his family. Furthermore, Shoeboxed can give him the peace of mind that all his ducks are in a row for tax season and all his networking opportunities are maximized. It’s like giving Dad a personal secretary! (And one that Mom won’t be jealous of).

Time equals money, and giving Dad some great time-saving gifts could be exactly what he needs for this Father’s Day season.

For December 15, Amazon’s largest day for orders, the retailer sold 6.3 million items, up from 5.4% on the same day last year.

Inquisitr reports that one of the most popular items purchased through Amazon this year was a nose and ear hair trimmer. The Groom Mate Platimum XL was the most-purchased item in the health and personal care products category.

Amazon's 2008 Holiday Sales Were Up 17% From 2007

Though Amazon was quick to release this report, it is unclear as to whether this trend was enjoyed by other well-known online retailers. Overall sales for the holiday shopping season were down about 5.5%, and online sales were projected to be up 2% this year. Reports from other big-name online retailers has not yet been released.

Low overhead and bulk purchasing allow online retailers like Amazon keep costs low, which may have lured more customers this year looking for great deals. Many states also collect no sales tax on online purchases, making the deals that much sweeter.

Cyber Monday, then, is the Monday after Black Friday, when people supposedly return to work after Thanksgiving and shop online at their desks. Though it would be easy to think that this logic is true, there is not a whole lot of evidence that Cyber Monday is as big of a phenomenon as some make it out to be.

For example, in 2005, when the term Cyber Monday was first in widespread use by the media, the busiest online shopping day of the year was actually December 5.

So maybe it’s a myth that people spend more money online today than other days later in the holiday shopping season. But because Cyber Monday has become such a media phenomenon and marketing event. This means you might be able to find some good deals online. Make sure to send your email receipts to Shoeboxed (yourusername@shoeboxed.com)!

I went through and created what is hopefully a handy guide to help you set up filtering on your Gmail account. If you don’t have a Gmail account, but you want one, you can sign up for free at www.gmail.com. Let’s get started!

1. In your account, click on “Settings” in the top right corner.
2. Click on “Filters” tab and then click “Create a new filter”
3. Here is where Gmail asks you to set up rules for which emails it should automatically forward to Shoeboxed. I played around with this for a little bit using their “Test Search” feature, but I had pretty good success with putting “receipt” OR “purchase in the Subject field and revolution OR alert OR “You Have a New” in the “Doesn’t have” field. This makes it so that anything with the words receipt or purchase in the subject line will be forwarded on. The words that I chose for the “Doesn’t have” category rule out blog updates (because our blog is called Receipt Revolution), Google Alerts that I get for receipt-related info, and of course, notifications from Shoeboxed that I get when I have new receipts.
4. Click “Next Step” and you’ll be taken to a page with more settings. Click the checkbox “Forward it to:” and enter in your Shoeboxed email address (yourusername@shoeboxed.com) and click “Create Filter”. If you want to send in all your past email receipts, also check the box “Also apply filter to ## conversations below.”
   
5. Wait and watch the email receipts come into your Shoeboxed account!
   

With all these paper receipts in my account, it’s certainly cool to watch my statistics grow and evolve over time. For some reason, though, with all the paper receipts I got to play around with, I realized that I hadn’t really be shopping online all that much recently.

So then I thought: might as well make an impulse buy. And to Amazon I went. I bought a couple of books and gave them my Shoeboxed email address. They came right into my account, right along with all my paper receipts. Voila!

This was the original feature of Shoeboxed when we launched our website last summer, but it’s still my favorite.

So remember, every time you buy something online, tell the store that your email is address is your username @shoeboxed.com. The receipts that they send you will come right into your Shoeboxed account. Follow up emails that they attempt to send you at your Shoeboxed email address, will be separated out from your receipts in Your Shopping Inbox inside your Shoeboxed acccount.

Old email receipts that you are hiding in your email client can be forwarded to your Shoeboxed account as well. Though it may be kind of a pain to search for all those old receipts in your cluttered inbox, just think: This is the last time you’ll ever have to do it, because Shoeboxed will organize them for you.

Here are some of the core principles, as noted on his website:

* Capturing anything and everything that has your attention
* Defining actionable things discretely into outcomes and concrete next steps
* Organizing reminders and information in the most streamlined way, in appropriate categories, based on
how and when you need to access them
* Keeping current and “on your game” with appropriately frequent reviews of the six horizons of your
commitments (purpose, vision, goals, areas of focus, projects, and actions)

He also has some interesting things to say about receipts:

If your receipts are all over the place, your filing system is chaotic, and your in-basket is dysfunctional, it just seems like too much work to do to find and organize the tasks at hand.

And

We’ll probably want to claim deductions, but if we do we’ll have to back them up, and that means we’ll need all the receipts. Oh, my God! I don’t know if we really have all the receipts we’d need and what if we didn’t have all the receipts but we claimed the deductions anyway and we got audited? Audited? Oh, no – the IRS’s JAIL!!

Anyway, Shoeboxed is not just about getting your receipts organized and manageable. We’re big supporters of any life hacks out there that can help you get other parts of your life more organized or make you more productive.

And that’s why we have the new offer: If you buy a membership to our Receipt Mail-In program for $9, we will send you a free copy of David Allen’s book, “Getting Things Done.”

Update: Oct. 14, 2008 — Offer expired, and dead links removed.

Well, actually, as much as we like online shopping, we are not necessarily fond of every holiday neologism that is being made up by the industry. I’m thinking back to an old episode of The Simpsons, where they create a new holiday called Love Day just to drive up sales of terrible merchandise.

The term “Cyber-Monday” was coined in 2005, when ComScore reported that online spending increased by 26% on the first Monday after Thanksgiving, compared to the year before.

There may be a lot of reasons for this (one for sure is that online spending is simply increasing by two-digit percent numbers every year, no matter what day it is) but the whole reason it was given such a moniker makes it seem like just another marketing stunt.

With things like Valentine’s or Mother’s day, which are also heavily pushed by businesses, we at least have something (or someone) to care for on these days. Yes Valentine’s Day is commercial but we’re willing to accept it because it’s also about love and family affection. Cyber Monday is different. It seems like it’s a cold, impersonal online shopping day. And there aren’t any holiday decorations.

Nevertheless, we love deals. And a lot of stores use this new holiday to bring you some of those. So, while keeping the criticism about useless marketing buzzwords up, we will happily enjoy getting a good bargain.

If you’re like us, you can get the best overview of what stores offer what kind of discount, here .

We hope you get a good deal and wish you a good week!

Use your Shoeboxed email address to buy online and scan or upload images of the paper receipts you get in stores this season. Not only will all your receipts be quickly organized, but you will also be able to share your newest acquisitions with other shoppers looking for inspiration.

Here are a few tips for a great holiday shopping season:

1. Check online deals. People too often overlook the deals made available by online stores and just head off to the mall. Be sure to go online and search for items you are interested in buying. You may find some very attractive deals.

2. If you go out to shop, check store opening times and try to go as early as possible to be sure that you will get the items you want at the price they were advertised for. The great deals usually run out quickly on Black Friday, but it’s also true for the rest of the holiday season at many stores.

3. Check the newspaper! Some great deals are revealed only in the newspaper, can be missed if you’re not looking.

4. Solicit the help of friends! Getting a recommendation from another shopper is invaluable. Sift through all the ads, and actually get want you want this shopping season.

5. Check out our favorite stores here to get a glimpse into the wackiest, most useful, and most entertaining stores on the web.

This week is one of the most exciting times of the year for shopping. Unfortunately, it can also be a very disorganized and frantic time. Make sure you shop online with your Shoeboxed email address and organize all your receipts on your free Shoeboxed account!

We are taking the site down for a few hours this afternoon because we are putting up a new version later tonight. There are lots of upgrades coming related to receipt organization, our bread and butter. We’ll also throw some really fun new features your way that you might not expect, but we think you’ll love ‘em as much as we do. Be prepared to finally see the secret we’ve been barely able to keep for the last few months.

Receipts and e-mails are still coming in and being processed while the site is down. If you need to access that information while this maintenance is going on, send an e-mail to help@team.shoeboxed.com, and we will get that info to you manually.

The new Shoeboxed is the best thing since bread… sliced or otherwise. Yeah, I said it.

Updates to come.

Bold statements, for sure, especially when made in a college dorm room. But Taylor has had a really detailed plan for how to actually reach these goals since the beginning, and we’ve been tackling this project in phases. The first step for Shoeboxed was to become the leading online tool for receipt organization. The incredible success and support we’ve seen in this area is really promising for what’s coming next. Several of the most well-read blogs on the Internet have written about us, and we’ve exceeded pretty much every expectation we have had for growth. We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished, but Shoeboxed is so much more than receipts, and we’re getting ready to unveil the newest part of the Shoeboxed Idea.

So what is it? Where is Shoeboxed going?

Well I’m about ready to pee my pants about what’s coming next. We’ll be building off of our receipt organizer, and making Shoeboxed useful in a new kind of way. Instead of just being about organization and security, Shoeboxed will soon be able to more closely mirror the real-world shopping experience. The size of the Shoeboxed community is certainly unbelievable, and we are so excited to be a more engaging, personalized, and fun service for anyone who’s ever made a purchase… ever.

Keep checking back for the new stuff, and get excited for a fresh new look too!

But if there’s one thing I always fall for, it’s customized products. An iPod with my quote on the side? I’ll take it. A track suit with “Alex” printed on the derriere? Yep. A cubic zirconia mouth grill that says “Brazil”? Hello! Make it two.

This is why I had a small heart attack when the German company Dein Design gave the Shoeboxed team spiffy laptop skins with the Shoeboxed logo (you can see mine in the picture). The skins don’t just rock, they also protect your computer from scratches so it will always look like new.

How Dein Design actually gets the skins for laptops, iPods, or IKEA tables to apply without any bubbles is completely beyond me (something to do with the honeycomb design- yeah, no idea). How the skins can be removed without damaging my computer so I can replace them with other skins is also a mystery.

All I know is that it’s cool, individual, and available online. Which means I can buy it without setting foot in a mall and store my receipt safely at shoeboxed.com. I’ll take two, please!

We think you should think again! Shoeboxed is totally worth it, even if you only buy things online a couple times a year.

I can say this with certainty because I am the same way; in fact, I don’t buy things in general unless I have to, and sometimes I don’t buy things even when I know I should (you can see the picture of my shoes in the blog archives for an example of this).

Anyway, a few days ago I remembered that my time in Berlin is drawing to a close, and that I actually need to start getting ready to go back to the good old U.S. of A. I quickly realized that I had absolutely no idea when my return flight was leaving, or even on which day the flight departed, and that it would probably be in my best interests to find that information out. Of course, my travel itinerary was nowhere to be found. However, I knew the airline had sent a copy of the flight information with my e-ticket receipt to my e-mail address. This was not exactly reassuring, though, since that e-mail was a few months old, and finding one e-mail in my inbox is like finding one specific needle in a haystack made out of other needles.

Long story short, I searched through my inbox for what felt like a really long time, and ended up asking my mom to send me her copy of my itinerary. She was not impressed.

Obviously, none of this would have happened if I had been using Shoeboxed when I bought the ticket—my e-ticket information would have been easily accessible right from the start. This experience made me realize that it doesn’t matter how often you shop online – Shoeboxed is a great tool for anyone to have.

Last Chance for free shipping
Presenting… free shipping
New at Crewcuts… Seaside Chic
Hello sale…
New men’s must-have: the cardigan

Let’s recap why this is annoying. First of all, I don’t need a cardigan, and neither do the rest of you guys out there. Second of all, I’m in Germany, and J. Crew doesn’t even ship here, so I couldn’t care less what their non-existent shipping costs. Third, CrewCuts is the children’s clothing line at J.Crew, and unless there’s something I don’t know about, I’m not buying baby clothes for a while. Though I do like J. Crew otherwise, I hate getting all these irrelevant e-mails in my inbox.

But now that Shoeboxed is up and running, I went to jcrew.com and modified my account settings. In about 20 seconds, I changed the e-mail associated with my account to my @shoeboxed.com address. Now all these store notifications come into my Shoeboxed account. I also one-click-unsubscribed from J.Crew e-mails, causing them to only show up in my Shoeboxed account, and to stay away from my personal inbox.

I still like J. Crew, and I still get those e-mails in my Shoeboxed account, but now I don’t have to have them in my inbox, where all my important personal communications are. My personal inbox is breathing easier, and so am I.

I also did this for all the other stores where I shop (and the stores that send me e-mails even though I don’t buy stuff from them) and changed out my e-mail address.

So now, whenever I’m in the mood to shop, I just go to my Shoeboxed account, see all my new e-mails, check out all the places that are having sales or recommending new products, and start shopping from there.