Got friends? Invite them to Shoeboxed and earn credits on your account.

Hi,

I know I’ve talked quite a bit about our Shoeboxed referral program, but I wanted to give you a friendly Shoeboxed Review. The majority of people on Shoeboxed invite friends, so I really do want to drill the point home: you can earn money for telling your friends about how awesome Shoeboxed is!

Our invite feature allows you to easily send a message about Shoeboxed to all or some of your email contacts. If you use some kind of webmail account like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, or AOL, you can access your address book from Shoeboxed and send them a quick, pre-written message.

So you’ve done them a favor by introducing them to the world’s easiest receipt scanning service. But what else do you get?

Well, for every three people that signs up after you invite them, you’ll get a $45 credit to your Receipt Mail-In account. Now that’s a good deal! If you are keeping on top of your referrals, you could essentially be using Shoeboxed Receipt Mail-In for free!

One other thing: you can track your invites on your Dashboard (the first page you see now after logging in).

So what are you waiting for? Tell your friends, family members, and coworkers! Heck, even tell your enemies, archenemies, and nemeses!

Josh Lowensohn wrote up a great review of our new AutoCategorization feature on CNET!

Read it here, and feel free to post a comment about how much you love Shoeboxed. I did!

Though we do our best to process your Receipt Mail-In envelopes in the order they arrive in our office, not all envelopes are equal, and we do fast-track envelopes that have receipts that are prepped well for fast scanning.

Here are some things that you can do to make sure your receipts are scanned as quickly as possible:

Remove staples and paper clips: We use feed scanners at Shoeboxed (as opposed to flat-bed scanners) to scan your receipts. As a result, we cannot put paper through there that has any staples or paper clips, as it might jam the scanner. When we receive receipts with staples or paper clips, we have to remove them manually, which understandably slows down the process of scanning.

Detach receipts from backing paper: For some reason, many offices force their employees to tape their receipts to some kind of backing paper. Oftentimes, this means that many receipts are taped to a single sheet. Shoeboxed treats each sheet that goes through the scanner as a single receipt, so when there are four or five of them, your data will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to organize in Shoeboxed. So, if your receipts are taped to paper, please remove them from backing paper before sending them in.

Flatten your receipts as much as possible: As mentioned before, your receipts will go through a feed scanner, and the flatter the receipt, the better the scan. If one of our scanner operators has to manually flatten your receipts, it may take much longer for your receipts to be scanned.

Orient your receipts in the same direction: If your receipts are all oriented in the same direction, it is much faster for our scanner operators to scan your receipts. Making sure they are all facing the same way and are all right-side-up helps speed up your processing time.

Organize receipts by similar widths: If you can stack your perfectly flattened receipts  grouped together by similar widths, you’ll be a favorite of our scanner operators. You’ll notice that there are four or five standard widths of receipts, so you’ll have distinct stacks.

Cab receipts are a standard small width.

Not only are these tips great for speeding up your processing time, it’s also a great way to show your love to the scanner operators here at Shoeboxed!

If you’re a Receipt Mail-In User, you’ve probably noticed the red cards that we have been placing in the envelopes that we send to you. I wanted to take a moment on the blog to explain what those are and how you can earn a very significant amount of credit on your Shoeboxed account.

The red card represents the beginning of our referral program whereby you’ll get credits to your account for every person you successfully refer to Receipt Mail-In. If you get a friend to sign up for any Receipt Mail-In plan (Lite, Classic, or Business), you’ll get a $15 credit to your account. Your friend will also get a $15 credit.

To claim your credit, email us at mail-in@team.shoeboxed.com with the people you have invited. If one of them signs up, we will administer the credits!

When you are telling your friends about Shoeboxed, remember to tell them these great things about Shoeboxed:

• No scanning required from you
• Stress-free tax time (IRS accepted)
• Easy expense reports
• No clutter! Receipts in one place!
• Private and Secure (McAfee and TRUSTe approved)

Look for more updates in the future about how this referral system will be further automated, but in the meantime, we invite you to keep spreading the word with this referral program and with our invite feature, which if you haven’t used yet, you should! Your friends and colleagues will thank you.

Though we are still synching up our the two registration processes that we have for Shoeboxed, I wanted to go ahead and talk about the new pricing that we have up for our main registration site, http://start.shoeboxed.com.

Over the last week, we have been testing out the new pricing to see what people think, and the feedback has been very positive. We designed it so that it is both cheaper to catch up on a bulk “catch-up” scan job and more flexible for you if your volume fluctuates from month to month.

Perhaps the most popular new feature of the pricing structure is the free bulk scan that you get if you prepay for a year of Receipt Mail-In. For Lite (the newer, better Basic), you’ll get a 250-receipt bulk scan. For Classic and Business, you’ll get a 500- or 1000-receipt bulk scan, respectively. Also, when you sign up for a year, you get 12 months of Receipt Mail-In service and you only pay for 10 months’ worth. So signing up for a year is really the best deal around for getting your receipts organized.

We are encouraged by the positive feedback so far, and are happy with how many people have been signing up as of late.
If you have any questions about the new pricing, don’t hesitate to email or call us.We’d love to hear your thoughts!

As always, you can reach us at help@team.shoeboxed.com or (888) 369-4269.

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.

You don’t have to scan receipts yourself here at Shoeboxed. That much seems obvious at this point. We finally give you the option to get rid of the stress of scanning and organizing your receipts by just putting them in an envelope.

Some of our Mail-In users have asked a couple of questions about the best way to prep their documents for scanning, and I just wanted to go ahead and answer them on the blog. So here is a list of things to keep in mind before sending in your receipts to be scanned. These will allow your receipts to be scanned and uploaded into your account as quickly as possible.

• Please flatten all receipts as best you can. Remember they are going through a scanner, so bundling them or wadding them is generally unwise.
• Please tape any tears in your receipts. Torn receipts might not make it through our scanners correctly.
• Please remove all staples and paper clips that may be attached to your receipts.
• Please make sure that your envelope closes securely after you have put the receipts in. This make sure that it does not open or rip during the mailing process.
• If you are a Receipt Mail-In Express user, you may separate your receipts into subcategories. We will then make sure that those categories remain. For Receipt Mail-In Basic and Receipt Mail-In Classic, your receipts will be processed as one batch only.

I hope this helps. If anyone has any other tips or tricks that you use to keep your receipts ready for scanning, let us know. We just want to be able to scan your receipts as quickly as possible!

If you’re a Receipt Mail-In member, do you ever wish you could track the envelopes full of receipts that you send to us? Have your receipts arrived at our headquarters yet? Have they been processed? Are they on their way back home?

Well, we’ve been working hard to bring you this feature, and have put it online. Not everyone’s information will show up right away, but that information will go online in the next few days. Yours may be up now though, so make sure you check it out. Just log into your account, and click Mail-In Dashboard from the side navigation bar. If you’re logged in, you can also just click here.

Here is an example from Taylor’s account:

Hopefully this will give everyone a little more piece of mind and will allow you to have more accurate information about your Shoeboxed Receipt Mail-In envelopes.

We hope you enjoy this tool, and, as always, let us know what you think of it. We really do value your feedback. As always, we’re happy to talk with you on the phone if you call us at (888) 369-4269. You can also send us an email at help@team.shoeboxed.com.

If you are not a Receipt Mail-In member, but want to be, check out our different plans here.

Happy tracking!