I’ve talked to several people this week that are ready to sign up for Shoeboxed, but have one last question: If I have a backlog of receipts, how do I get started?

Sure, Shoeboxed is great for keeping up month-to-month with your receipts, but if you have a backlog, some find that their volume is just overwhelming. They wouldn’t be able to catch up if they just had one envelope per month. If this sounds like you, you’re not alone, and Shoeboxed can certainly help.

Indeed most people that need to get their receipts organized have a big backlog - a big box or two sitting in their home or office that has been piling high with receipts for years. After all, if you’ve never had Shoeboxed, you know how hard it is to get all those receipts organized, because no one wants to scan that many receipts themselves.

That’s why we offer bulk scanning.

On top of your Receipt Mail-In subscription, you can send in a large volume of receipts to us and we will scan them at special rates so you can get caught up. You just send your receipts to us in whatever container makes sense (box, big envelope, etc.). We scan them and upload them to your online account as normal, and then mail them back to you.

If you are interested in doing some bulk scanning, email us at mail-in@team.shoeboxed.com or call us at (888) 369-4269.

In this world of receipts, we must know what we’re up against. Thermal paper, the ubiquitous material on which most of our receipts are printed on threatens our taxes, expense reports, and bookkeeping efforts by fading in seemingly impossibly fast fashion. In order to defeat it, we must understand it. From Wikipedia:

Thermal paper is paper that is impregnated with a chemical that changes color when exposed to heat. It is used in thermal printers and particularly in cheap, lightweight devices such as adding machines, cash registers, and credit card terminals.

The paper is impregnated with a solid-state mixture of a dye and a suitable matrix; a combination of a fluoran leuco dye and an octadecylphosphonic acid is an example. When the matrix is heated above its melting point, the dye reacts with the acid, shifts to its colored form, and the changed form is then conserved in metastable state when the matrix solidifies back quickly enough.

The only good way to make sure you are protected from fading receipts is to scan them. By scanning receipts and uploading them to Shoeboxed, your receipts will be captured and actually enhanced, so your receipts will always be readable and at your fingertips.

Some people come up to me on the street and say, “Hey, but what if my receipts are faded already?” I then say, “The awesome scanners that we use in Receipt Mail-In automatically enhance the contrast on your receipts so they become more readable online that they were in real life. Who are you?”

Know thy enemy; beat thy enemy!

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!

Most receipts today are printed on thermal paper, which is a special type of paper that is impregnated with a chemical that changes color when exposed to heat. Though it certainly sounds cool, oftentimes, it is, in fact, NOT. Most of those receipts you have that are faded are a result of this thermal paper. Receipts printed on this type of paper can become unreadable in a matter of months!

While you may think that you have safely stored all your receipts in a complex file-folder system in case you should ever need them, different factors such as sensitivity to temperature, humidity and light can make your receipts unreadable, and therefore useless. Sounds scary, right?

Have no fear, Shoeboxed is here! We have some great features and tips to keep your receipts safe and secure.

If you have receipts that have already started to fade or become unreadable, our in-house scanners can restore them. We use state-of-the-art Kofax scanners that can work wonders with faded or otherwise unreadable images. High quality scans are essential for receipt organization. This Kofax technology is prohibitively expensive for many people, but we able to bring you high quality scans at a very low cost to you. Here is an example of what we can do with your receipts with the Kofax Virtual Re-Scan (VRS) technology:

If you don’t want to even risk being in a situation where you need to produce a receipt that turns out to be completely unreadable (for return purposes, an audit, or just to win an argument about how much you have actually been spending on your new hobby), you can start using Receipt Mail-In TODAY for only $9.95!

We give your receipts a safe home where they will be preserved forever!