Shoeboxed has some pretty new technology, and a lot of awesome features. In order to get a grasp on all you can do here, and how to best organize your receipts, it can be helpful if somebody walks you through it.

Since we can’t head over to your house and sit down with you, we decided that the next best thing would be to do a webcast. So guess what? Shoeboxed is hosting its first ever webcast next week. We want you to come!

Wait, hold on. What’s a webcast?

Webcast, webinar, live online instructional streaming video, potato, tomato. It’s kind of a buzzword I suppose.

Our webcast will be a live video that you can access online. The Shoeboxed team will be there to explain how Shoeboxed works, tips and tricks for using Shoeboxed, and to answer any questions you have via online chat. It should be a great resource. If you’ve had some lingering questions about Shoeboxed that you have been waiting to ask, we want you to come!

It’s also a good opportunity to get to know the people that make Shoeboxed happen each and every day.

The webcast will take place on Wednesday August 20 at 2PM EST. Register for free here.

We look forward to seeing you there!

I’ve heard this myth out there. So scary, this myth. I thought I might warn you, prepare you, just in case. Ready? I couldn’t believe it either: Many people are forced to tape receipts to paper.

Whether for bookkeeping, archiving, or expense reports, everyday many do-gooding Americans are told that scotch-taping their receipts to yet another piece of paper is the best way to get their expenses organized.

Fortunately, for each and every one of you that has been forced into such a situation, who has sat there with scotch tape in one hand and papers in the other wondering what on earth, who has wasted so much tape and so much paper.

To you we say, “Welcome.” Shoeboxed is here. Step away from the tape and put down the paper.

With Shoeboxed, you can send you receipts as loose pieces of paper (actually that’s how we want them) in an envelope. No tape or paper backing needed. Your receipts will be scanned and entered in to your online account, so you can sort them in a way that makes sense. There’s no need to have some elaborate filing system anymore. We’ll make your receipts sortable for you, without the tape.

One feature that we have released on the website without really talking about much is Trash Receipts. Since we wanted to create a place for your receipts to go (Get it? That’s our tagline.), we wanted a place for your unwanted receipts to go as well. There are some receipts that can be annoying to have in your account, let’s be totally honest.

When you send in duplicate receipts for us to scan in Receipt Mail-In for example, we scan both, but you might not actually want them in there. Now when you delete receipts, they will be put out of the way in your Trash Receipts. You can navigate to Trash Receipts through the left-hand side nav.

Web Worker Daily has been one of my favorite blogs out there for a while because, well, I’m a web worker. Interesting articles and good writing have given it a place on my bookmarks. That’s why I was so excited to see an article about Shoeboxed on Web Worker Daily today.

Really, it makes a lot of sense. For business travelers and others who use the web in their stressful daily lives, Shoeboxed can really make a difference. Saving you time (and therefore money) Shoeboxed and Receipt Mail-In can put you ahead of your competition.

Here are a few excerpts from this great article:

I wonder if in five years time, we’ll be ’shoeboxing’? Infact, most of us probably already are…

What’s actually more useful than storing and archiving a receipt’s image, is what can be done with the related metadata. After all you could even use Flickr, Scrnshots or Skitch to privately store receipts. Shoeboxed will allow you to categorize, name, quantify and analyze your purchases. This data can be exported to other applications (Excel, Quicken) or as a report to understand your personal metrics.

In the meantime, Shoeboxed’s basic mail-in plan appears to be a useful and valuable starting point to experiment with…

For many web workers, it could provide a simple solution to an irritating problem.

If you haven’t had a chance to yet, sign up and start getting your receipts scanned and organized today!
There is no better way to track spending, keep organized, and prepare for taxes than Shoeboxed’s receipt organization tools!

I also just wanted to note that I am super excited that people are starting to use Shoebox as a verb. Makes me smile every time.

I’ve been using Receipt Mail-In since we first started offering it. I have over a thousand receipts in my own account now, as I send in about 50 every month to be scanned and uploaded.

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.

We were featured in the Washington Post on Friday, and that post was circulated in a bunch of different places, one of which was the daily news briefing of the American Society of Interior Designers.

When that went out to a few thousand people, we got a bunch of phone calls from ASID members extremely interested in our Receipt Mail-In service. We were at first surprised, since we have never specifically approached interior designers about Receipt Mail-In. It seems, however, that Mail-In meets the needs of interior designers quite well.

That’s why we have a new offer for all ASID members:

Call us before June 20, 2008 and get a 12 month subscription for just $149.95, a savings of $50.

Real people are ready to take your call at 1-888-369-4269 (9am-11pm EST).

Shoeboxed allows you to take on more clients, spend time doing the design work that you like doing, and stop fuddling around with receipts. Call us to learn more!

It’s surprising how many people call us and tell us that they literally have a shoebox full of receipts that they want us to scan and organize for them. For whatever reason, the shoebox has become a place to store your small but valuable items. From receipts to jewelry to your kids’ drawings, shoeboxes help you organize your stuff.

Some people take it to a whole other level, though. One of the most popular news stories of the day yesterday was about a guy who learned that an antique goblet that he had in a shoebox was worth over a million dollars.

Now that the little gold cup has left the shoebox under his bed and is heading for an auction room, John Webber rather regrets the pot-shots he took with his air gun - even though the dents did flatten out nicely with the back of a spoon. After all, it now has a £500,000 price on its head.

Shoeboxes are great ways to keep and organize your stuff. We’re just taking that concept online. Digitize your receipts and get them on Shoeboxed, then you can organize them into virtual shoeboxes on our site. We can’t guarantee, however that you will find a virtual million-dollar goblet in your online shoeboxes. Sorry.

There are a fair number of websites out there that want to let you know how you can organize your paper. A lot of times, I can’t help but chuckle a little bit. They’ll give you great ways to set up folders and labels and a schedule whereby you’ll spend hours and hours a month stuffing paper into nicely labeled drawers. Come on people, there’s a better way!

The old way:

Use complicated filing systems with pre-determined categories and subcategories to decide where to file a single receipt.

The Shoeboxed way:

Instead of folders, we use “shoeboxes” to give you the same managability, but with more flexibility. In Shoeboxed, a single receipt can be in several shoeboxes, so you’re not forced to pick one specific category for each receipt. That way, if a receipt falls under more than one category, you can find it in any shoebox that you’ve added it to.

Shoeboxes give you an extra bonus too — put your receipts to work! You can view graphs of relevant spending trends at the bottom of each shoebox. Use them to understand and analyze your spending behavior!

It’s easy to create, edit or delete Shoeboxes, and you don’t have to worry about deleting receipts, when deleting Shoeboxes. To start organizing right away, click on the following link:

https://www.shoeboxed.com/my-shoeboxes.htm

Don’t have enough receipts in your account to use shoeboxes to their full potential? Take advantage of our unique receipt scanning service. Learn more.

If you’ve been using Shoeboxed for awhile, it can be easy to forget that Shoeboxed isn’t just about scanning receipts. There’s a lot to Shoeboxed, and I’d like to point out some of my favorite things about the site over the next couple of days on the blog.

So, without further adieu:

Using Shoeboxed will revolutionize how you track expenses. Here’s some of the many wonderful things you can do with your new account:

1. Build a comprehensive view of your spending habits when you add images of your receipts, use your new account, [username]@shoeboxed.com, to shop, or even mail in your receipts and have us scan them
2. Use a flexible new filing system of shoeboxes to budget and see how you are spending your money
3. Prepare your expense reports, taxes, and insurance claims faster and more easily
4. Share Shoeboxed receipts when you invite friends and coworkers to win a free t-shirt

If you’re just getting to know Shoeboxed, poke around our site for awhile. If you’re a veteran, treat this as just a reminder of all the great features we have. Sometimes its hard to remember they’re all there!

Craig Reber wrote a great story in the Dubuque Telegraph Herald that just makes me want to use Shoeboxed even more. Of course, I am a Receipt Mail-In user so I manage to get pretty much all of my receipts scanned into my Shoeboxed account online. But I usually just use Shoeboxed as a way to keep track of my personal budgeting.

Craig points out some interesting facts in his article that really highlight why Shoeboxed can be good for insurance reasons as well.

“You should have a list of all of your property that you consider valuable,” said Cpl. Dan Sabers, of the Dubuque Police Department.

Dubuque police officers routinely locate property that they can’t return to the owner because of a lack of identifiable documentation: name, model, serial number and any other identifiable markings. Sabers emphasizes the importance of documenting valuable items, whether it’s a bicycle, a power tool or big-screen television. And it’s a lot easier to document possessions before suffering a loss from a burglary, fire, tornado or other disaster. It’s as easy as making a list in a notebook and saving sales receipts.

Sabers estimates that only about 5 percent to 10 percent of the population documents valuable possessions.

Along with written information, the Insurance Information Institute recommends that people consider adding photographs of their possessions, which can be done easily with a digital camera. Those with film cameras can scan print photos or have their film developer save the images to a disk. You can store the print photos with a copy of your inventory.

Well, funny story. Shoeboxed lets you do all of this. It’s a great tool to keep your receipts so you can prove you own something that was lost or damaged. Shoeboxed also allows you to add photos of items that you own. Just upload the receipt, and then you can attach items to them and add photos and notes. Never lose out on getting compensated if your belongings are stolen or damaged!

I tend to think that financial, physical, and mental clutter are interconnected. A writer for Simple Dollar ( a financial blog “for the rest of us”) blogged on Unclutterer (organization for all) about this concept in a great entry that I wanted to share with you. “The Connections Between Mental, Physical, and Financial Clutter” preaches how becoming a mindful consumer can limit your spending to more essential purchases.

The first step to becoming a mindful consumer is to practice being mindful in the present. Erin Doland from Unclutterer has a 30-second challenge. Close your eyes and entertain thoughts relevant to everything that is going on around you. Shut out your to-do list, stop thinking about your boyfriend/girlfriend, and don’t let your mind swirl. Are your ideas focused? Are your muscles tense or sore? Is your breathing rapid or deep?

Being mindful of the present, and only the present, can be very difficult. I didn’t make it longer than five minutes, without losing focus on the present. Practice during your everyday activities. Next time you shop, ask yourself, “why do I need this?” Figure out how many hours of work it would take you to pay for the product. You’ll find that when you rationalize your purchases, it’s easier to stay within your budget.

While the article touched on what can be done in the moment to become a mindful consumer, I think that it’s essential to train your mind to evaluate purchases through reflection. If you’re a “math” person, examine your spending history statistically. You can use Shoeboxed’s graphs (found at the bottom of each of your shoeboxes) to analyze how you’ve been spending and evaluate specific purchases. Does your spending have an upward trend? What could you do to curb it? When you shop, try to visualize where your purchase would fall on the graph. Would this purchase continue your upward spending? Would this purchase deviate extremely from your average spending on products of this type?

If you’re more of an “English” person, grab a journal and a pen. Reflect on some of your purchases. You can look over your receipts, to help you remember what you’ve purchased at what cost. Did the purchase live up to your expectations? Did the product last long enough to warrant it’s initial cost? Do you use the product often? If you find that your purchases haven’t lived up to your expectations relative to their cost, research and see if there are cheaper/better alternatives. Next time you shop, compare purchases with those you’ve reflected on. Will the purchase fulfill your needs and expectations?

Reflect and clear your thoughts to rationalize your decisions. Being aware of how you are spending your money, is the first step to curbing unnecessary expenditures.

As you no doubt noticed, Shoeboxed has a sleek new design inside the site. We wanted to make Shoeboxed a little easier on the eyes, and we also changed around the navigation to streamline the receipt organization process. We hope that we can save you some time and frustration by making it easy to navigate and manage your receipts, whether you have 5 or 5,000 in your account.

The main navigation for the application itself is now in the side navigation bar. Many of the navigation elements before were split between the side and the top, and we think by combining them together, we can make it easier to get around.

In the top navigation, there is now more information about the company, including a vision statement and our environmental stance in addition to existing pages like About Us and the Shoeboxed Info Desk, a one-stop destination for FAQs, help, and white papers about relevant topics that we launched last week.

The new tagging system released today is another way to improve the way you manage all their receipts. Information about what shoeboxes a given receipt is in is now available from the My Receipts table, so that it is easier to keep track of what receipt is organized where. This was something that a lot of you asked for, and we are happy to deliver it!

As always, let us know what you think. We are all about you, and want to make the site as useful to you as possible. Email us at help@team.shoeboxed.com with any comments or suggestions!

Also, if you have an account at Digg.com, help us make our story popular here.

David Allen is a widely popular author who preaches the concept of GTD, or Getting Things Done. He is a thought leader in the area of personal productivity, and I’ve been meaning to mention him and his suggestions on the blog for awhile now. For a limited time, we are offering to send you a FREE David Allen book! 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.” Sign up here: http://deals.shoeboxed.com/gtd.html

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.” Sign up here: http://deals.shoeboxed.com/gtd.html

I do lots of different things at Shoeboxed - I guess that’s the nature of working 16-hour days. One of the most entertaining parts of my job, though, is actually using Shoeboxed. We want our user experience to be second-to-none, so we all use Shoeboxed religiously to organize our receipts, and we are all veritable Receipt Mail-In addicts.

Before I started using Shoeboxed, I never did any kind of serious budgeting. Living off my parents, the money coming in always seemed reconcilable with what I was shelling out. I was content just looking at my bank account online to check my balances. But I really wasn’t able to track my spending with any sort of accuracy. Debit card statements are notoriously hard to read because of shortened store names and little reference to what you actually bought.

But then I started using Receipt Mail-In, and with basically no effort, I now know a LOT more about my spending habits. I’m now religious about asking for a receipt from cashiers, and a never forget to keep it in my wallet. I dump it in my Receipt Mail-In envelope as soon as I get back to my desk, and then mail it in whenever I feel like it. (Yes, even though I work about 30 feet from the Receipt Mail-In operation, I use USPS just like everybody else) I have hundreds of receipts in my account, and it was really interesting for me to realize that most all of my receipts are for food. Here is a sneak peak into my personal account:

It really made me step back and realize how much money I could save by eating out less, and eating at less expensive places.

So this morning? I’m eating cereal instead of going out for breakfast at one of the restaurants across the street.

Receipt Mail-In is the first receipt organization service that makes organization into a reasonable task. Sure, a lot of people save receipts, but it it so time consuming to scan the hundreds of receipts required to get the detailed analytics that Mail-In users (like me) are privy to. Aren’t you curious what you will find out about your spending habits with Receipt Mail-In?

Shoeboxed was born to be a receipt organization service. We’re committed to help everybody organize receipts with as little work as possible - everybody from individuals to small businesses to large corporations.

Because we are so committed to this idea, we are revamping our core organizational function on the site. Shoeboxes were originally designed as folders where you could store your receipts. Toward the end of last year, we introduced everyone to the idea that you could itemize your receipts on Shoebox, and organize those individual purchases in Shoeboxes instead of the whole receipt. But we’ve learned that whole receipts are often what people want to group together, so we are going back to our original functionality to keep it simple, and, I think, more useful.

We made this change based off of feedback from our users. Whenever you have a question, comment, or feature suggestion, please drop us a note at help@team.shoeboxed.com, and we’ll be happy to help. We love getting feedback, and are very open to creating exactly the features that you want on Shoeboxed. It’s all about you, baby.