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Hi,

Over here at Shoeboxed, we’re excited about the holidays, and we’re happy about all the people that will get Shoeboxed subscriptions as a presents in the next couple of months. Any good Holiday Gift Guide for a small business owner or business traveler begins and ends with Shoeboxed.

Purchasing a subscription of Shoeboxed’s scanning service for a loved on this holiday season will allow them to get their receipts, bills, invoices, and business cards organized in time for tax season.

With a subscription to Shoeboxed, our users mail in receipts to our headquarters to be scanned and entered into their online accounts. No scanner is required, and every receipt is scanned so it is available for tax filings, reimbursements, and even the holiday-season inevitability: returns and exchanges. Every business card is scanned and entered with all the relevant data so you can import your contact information to your email client, smart phone, or other contact management system!

No holiday gift guide will be complete this year without this time-saving receipt solution.

Learn more here!

You know it’s coming. You know it because you see Santas in department stores, you see holiday deals, and you hear people complaining about how it’s already happening. But love it or not (and, let’s be honest, you LOVE it), holiday shopping season is beginning. Here’s a few things to keep in mind this holiday shopping season (Hint: Shoeboxed can help).

With The Day After Thanksgiving quickly approaching and a recessed economy threatening to shrink our holiday shopping, it is more important than ever to track your spending and keep your financial documents organized as you are shopping.

Shoeboxed, the leading service for organizing receipts, offers an easy and affordable way to keep track of all your shopping documents this holiday season. Mail in your receipts to Shoeboxed, and you will have them online so you can make returns and exchanges easily. You’ll also benefit from the easy budgeting tools on Shoeboxed’s website so you can track your holiday spending. And your Shoeboxed email address: don’t forget to use it when you are doing the online portion of your holiday shopping-fest.

Holiday shopping is a fun time of year, but Shoeboxed will help you make it a little more manageable.

Shoeboxed has written before about the importance of checking your receipts when the retailer gives them to you. Merchants do not always print receipts  correctly, and often times cashiers make mistakes on how they ring things up.

A friend of mine sent me this story the other day, which reinforces this point. It turns out that Betty Knight, an 87-year-old shopping for a new television, set her sights on a 37″ Toshiba. An employee told her that he could give her the TV for $899 with a free delivery. That’s not a bad deal. But when she checked out at the register, her receipt said $849 with a $50 delivery charge. The cashier told her that’s the way the accounting department had to have it, and Knight figured it was alright.

But what if you wanted to return the TV? Then you could only get $849 back, because that’s what the receipt says you paid for TV.

This is just another friendly reminder to check your receipts! It could save you real money!

Did you make a cash contribution to your favorite charity? Have you recently spent a weekend cleaning stuff out of your garage or basement that you then donated to a local charity?

Charitable contributions can be tax deductible, but you must have the proper records to support your deduction. Due to the Pension Protection Act of 2006 the rules on recordkeeping for charitable contributions became a little more strict beginning in January 2007.

To deduct a charitable cash donation, regardless of the amount, you must have a bank record or a written communication from the charity showing the name of the charity and the date and amount of the contribution. Acceptable bank records would include canceled checks or bank or credit union statements containing the name of the charity, the date and the amount of the contribution.

Under the previous rules, records such as personal bank registers, diaries or notes made around the time of the donation could often be used as evidence of cash donations. Personal records like this are no longer sufficient.

Here are some additional tips to help you deduct your charitable contributions on your 2008 federal tax return.

• Charitable contributions are deductible only if you itemize deductions using Form 1040.
• Contributions must be made to a qualified organization.
• Used clothing and household items such as furniture, linens and appliances must be in good used condition.
• Vehicle donations are subject to special rules.
• To deduct charitable contributions of items valued at $250 or more you must have a written acknowledgment from the qualified organization.
• To deduct charitable contributions of items valued at $500 or more you must complete a Form 8283, Noncash Charitable Contributions, and attached the form to your return.

More information is available on the IRS Web site at IRS.gov. A good resource is IRS Publication 526, Charitable Contributions, found on the web site or by calling 800-TAX-FORM (800-829-3676).

Exciting Update: You can now upgrade your Shoeboxed account to include our Mail-In program on your Account & Settings page.

It’s easy to upgrade to any one of our three plans, Lite, Classic, or Business. From your Account & Settings page, you also have the option to sign up for one of our yearly plans, which comes with a free “catch-up” bulk scan and two months of service free.

Sign in at http://www.shoeboxed.com

With the holiday season approaching and tax season just around the corner, this is perfect time to get your receipts and business cards under control.

And if you prefer, we have customer service reps standing by that can take your order over phone at (888) 369-4269.

You may notice some changes in your account when you log in next time, as we released a big batch of upgrades and updates to the site this evening. The feature that you probably notice the most is the credit card feature.

Now you can add credit cards to your account, which you can then use to separate out purchases that you have made with a particular credit card. In your Account & Settings page, you can add your credit cards, and our Mail-In process will search through receipts for the last four digits of your credit card and automatically tag them with that credit card. The Mail-In service will also add credit cards to your account as it finds ones that you have not manually added.

You can also manually change the credit card that a receipt is associated with on the View Receipt page for any particular receipt.

The payment type of a receipt is also viewable from the Receipts Table in a new column. You’ll be able to sort through your Credit Card, Cash and Check receipts so you know more information about your spending habits and do better bookkeeping.

I don’t know about you, but it’s almost November, and I see Tax Season 2008 right around the corner. Since many people use Shoeboxed to organize their receipts for tax purposes, Shoeboxed will be rolling out new features and tools for you to prepare your receipts as easily as possible this tax season. We will also be bringing you more tax information on the blog and main website so that you can keep up to date on any changes to the Internal Revenue Services policies over the next few months. In a recurring series on the blog, Tax Tips, we will, with the help of the IRS, bring you important information about what you need to know for Tax Season.

With Tax Season coming up, we want to make sure you are well protected against any scams or misinformation you may come across when organizing your receipts and getting ready to file. We thought we’d bring you this informative release from the IRS that details some great tips for staying safe this Tax Season.

-Dan

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Life is complex enough without con artists trying to separate you from your hard earned dollars. It can be very costly if you become a victim of a scam that trades on the image or the mission of the IRS. Everyone should be vigilant in protecting personal, financial and tax information.

The IRS has these tips to avoid falling prey to con artists.

Watch your personal and financial information very closely, particularly during electronic transactions. The IRS is among a growing group of government agencies and corporations whose names and Web sites are being copied by imposters posing as employees conducting official business and seeking your personal information. Be aware that the IRS does not use e-mail to initiate contact with taxpayers about their accounts. Do not open links in unsolicited messages claiming to come from the IRS.

Not all scams come by way of the Internet or email. The telephone is a low-tech source of scams. Do not give away personal information to callers claiming to be from the IRS unless you have verified the caller’s identity. You can confirm an IRS contact by calling 800-829-1040

Thieves can use stolen personal data to access your financial accounts, run up charges on credit cards or apply for new loans. With a stolen identity a con-artist might try to use your Social Security Number to intercept your refund or falsify employment records, leaving the IRS with the impression that you did not report all of your income.

Some con artists earn their living by preparing false, and illegal, tax returns. Make certain that all of the information on your tax return is accurate since you are responsible for its content regardless of who prepares your return.

Dishonest return preparers, promising unreasonably large refunds, can cause many headaches for you. Such preparers attract new clients by promising large refunds while skimming a portion of the inflated refunds and charging high fees for preparation services. Choose carefully when you hire a tax preparer. As the saying goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

In contrast to shady tax preparers, some con artists openly tell you that you do not have to pay taxes. Be wary of anyone who encourages you to side-step your responsibility to file an income tax return or to pay the proper amount of tax due.

Some promoters make outlandish claims that taxes are not legal, that wages are not income, that a voluntary tax system means you can choose not to file or pay and that income tax returns violate your protection against self-incrimination or the right to privacy. Often these promoters will use techniques that are strikingly similar to any other con-artist to charge a high fee to share their “secrets” with you. Such arguments are false and have been repeatedly rejected by the courts. You may end up paying for this mistake twice, first when you pay for the bad advice and second when you are faced with a higher tax bill plus penalties and interest.

For more information about these and other tax scams visit the IRS Web site at IRS.gov.

The Industry Standard has released the results of the Industry Standard 100 Awards! After a public vote and a editorial review of Shoeboxed, we have been awarded second place in the Productivity category!

We’re humbled to have been ranked so high, as there were many great applications both in our category and throughout the 10 categories that the Industry Standard had. We just wanted to say thanks for everyone who voted for us to be nominated, and then voted again to help us get 2nd place! You’re the best!

Also worth mentioning is how much we have improved as an application during and after the voting period. During the voting period, we added automatic categorization of your receipts into 15 common tax categories, and launched Shoeboxed support of business cards. Both features have been extremely popular, so we consider those to even be a bonus to the app you all voted for!

To view the complete results, go here.

For an overview of the awards competition, this is from the Industry Standard website:

Overview
The Industry Standard Innovation 100 Awards — or the TIS 100 for short — is a community-driven awards program that showcases the top 100 Internet innovators across 10 categories. There is a multistage process to determine the TIS 100 and the winners for each of the ten categories. Readers, users, and company founders and executives can nominate and vote on the most innovative sites, services, and companies on the Web.

April 15th, the most dreaded day of the year, right? It’s when our taxes are due, and regardless of how much you support government programs, we all feel the pain of signing over a big check to Uncle Sam every April. Except for the smart few who file for tax extensions.

There is more information from the IRS here, but it’s not too complicated to qualify for a tax extension of six months. Just remember, when October 15th comes around, your taxes WILL be due. Procrastination can only last so long.

So I just wanted to give a shout-out to all our users that are putting together their taxes now in preparation for this new deadline. Good luck, and hopefully you find the process of filing tax returns much easier now that your receipts are organized with Shoeboxed!

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!

With Gmail, it is easy to set up filters that will automatically forward certain email messages to another address based on rules that you set. This can be helpful for use with Shoeboxed, as you can train your Gmail account to forward email receipts to Shoeboxed, where they can be better organized into categories, generate statistics, and be integrated with your paper receipts.

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!
   

Nobody likes an identity thief; that’s for sure. Everybody loves to see an identity thief go down in flames, but pretending you are someone else to steal money has been an increasingly common crime over the last ten years. Thankfully, we have all become more aware of common scams, and we know more ways to protect ourselves. Reporting lost credit cards, shredding all sensitive documents, and keeping your computer secure are just some of the simple protections that everyone should be doing.

One thing that continues to surprise me is how often criminals try to use other people’s credit cards. It’s not a particularly easy thing to pull off, as you leave a digital trail of all your activities; After a while, the cops won’t have any problem finding you.

But some criminals aren’t even smart enough to let the cops catch up to them. A man in Iowa City recently signed his own name on one of the credit card receipts he got after using a stolen credit card. Being an identity theft is stupid, but giving away your real identity while you’re doing it is another story.

Shoeboxed, which is certified by McAfee and TRUSTe as having taken all necessary precautions to keep your receipts safe and secure on Shoeboxed, is a safe place to store your receipts and other financial documents. To learn more about our extensive privacy practices, head on over to our security page.

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.