FEATURE UPDATE: In addition to our fancy new homepage, Shoeboxed has added a new feature that automatically categorizes your receipts into common tax categories. Based on a sophisticated algorithm that takes into account the receipt information, your receipts will be placed in default categories that are now in every Shoeboxed account.

Based on common tax categories, these default categories will come with every Shoeboxed account. This is a great time-saving feature, as you won’t have to spend as much time categorizing your own receipts. It’s just one way that Shoeboxed continues to make your life easier.

So here’s how it works: When you email, upload, or mail your grocery store receipts to Shoeboxed, they will automatically be put in your new Food Category, and when you fill up at the pump, that receipt will automatically head to your Gas Category. Your old receipts will be directed toward appropriate default categories in addition to new ones you put in.

You’ll still have the ability to create and use your own custom categories, but we think these default categories will help you stay organized without having to spend as much time doing it yourself. Hooray technology!

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.”

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.

The other day, I was talking with one my old friends who graduated a couple of years ahead of me in college. He’s a business consultant now, and is traveling almost every day of the week.

When he’s out on the road, he has to keep track of his receipts in order to get reimbursed by his company. He said that organizing his receipts was so annoying that he finally gave in and bought a portable scanner to bring with him on his business trips. The problem with the scanner, though, was that it was hard to use and extremely time consuming. The last thing he wanted to do after a hard day of work on the road was sit in his hotel and scan receipts.

So obviously I started telling him about Shoeboxed Receipt Mail-In. This innovative new program is perfect for business travelers and anyone else that has to organize their receipts but hates the prospect of getting down and dirty with their scanner. With Mail-In, we’ll scan your receipts for you and upload them into your secure Shoeboxed account. If you can stuff an envelope, you can have your receipts organized for your expense reports, taxes, and everyday purchase tracking. Now he can just drop an envelope into the mail after each trip, and he’s good to go.

There has never been a better way. Try it out today!

Filling out expense reports can be a costly hassle. Business travelers have to track and convert expenses to get reimbursed. There are many methods of dealing with the annoyance we all call expense reports: costly executive assistants, time-consuming Excel expense log-sheets, expensive scanners, and, of course, Shoeboxed Receipt Mail-In. But only one of these options is both cheap and easy.

For a year, Shoeboxed will scan your receipts for $19.95/month, leaving you with basically no work to do. To see how much you’ll save, Shoeboxed provides a Receipt Mail-In savings calculator. It lets you value your time per hour, specify how many receipts you get per month, and how much you might spend on a receipt scanner. It calculates how much time and money you save with Shoeboxed Receipt Mail-In.

One great thing about Mail-In is that it’s so simple. Put receipts in the envelope, seal, and send. You will have easy-to-use access to all of your expenditures in your Shoeboxed account. When expense report time comes around, you will be prepared to deal with it!

Who said expense reports couldn’t be cheap and easy?

Sign up today to get started!

We sent this news out in an e-mail last week, but I just wanted to note it here as well: Shoeboxed Mail-In has officially been launched. It works like this:

1. You receive a manila envelope from us with directions and an pre-paid, addressed envelope to send back.
2. You fill the return envelope with as many receipts as you like, and you send it back to us.
3. We scan in your receipts and enter in all the relevant data for you into your account, and then send your receipts back to you.
4. We let you know when your receipts have been scanned in and are available online.

The project is well under way, but due to the outrageous number of people that asked to be a part of the free introductory service, we had to limit the number of people that could be on it. Why? Because, well, startups are lean, mean frugality machines and we’d go out of business if we gave out free stuff to EVERYONE who wanted it. But we do want to thank everyone who e-mailed us in the last few days. the support has been amazing, and we can’t wait to work with you all in the coming months!

In the future, this service will have a small fee attached to it, but we wanted to work out some of the inevitable kinks in the logistics of sending out that many mailings and scanning that many receipts.

We’ve been excited about this project for a while now, but have been really re-energized by the overwhelming positive response to the announcement.

This summer in Berlin, we worked all the time. Days would go by when I didn’t leave our apartment/office. I usually worked straight from 11 a.m. to 4 a.m. Those precious hours of sleep were spent on an IKEA cot. Needless to say, I was tired for most of the summer.

Now with some pesky classes that weaseled their way into my daily schedule back at Duke, I seem to have less time that ever. Other people on the team are feeling the pinch too, and we’re looking for anything and everything to make the day longer and more productive.

I’m more of a traditional coffee and Pepsi fan for staying awake and alert. And it goes without saying that if you leave a Red Bull lying around the office, I’ll probably steal it.

But other people on the team are a little more desperate for feeling more alert. Matt, Tomas, and Justin are all trying a much-hyped sleeping schedule called polyphasic sleeping. This is where you get a couple of hours of “core” sleep at night, which usually lasts 2-3 hours. Then you take a 15-20 minute nap every 2 hours during the day. This series of short naps is supposed to make you feel really awake throughout the day.

The three of them have had a hard time in the beginning getting onto this insane schedule, but they all claim to feel amazing. They are writing a blog about their experience. Read it here.

And me? I think I’ll just go put on a pot of coffee.

When it comes to online shopping, I’ve realized that my mom isn’t really seeing the whole picture. Sure, she’s learned to order her running shoes online so that she can save money. We’ve set up online banking so that she can easily pay all of the bills electronically, saving paper and minimizing piles on the kitchen counter. She even knows that there’s a way to download music with something called “iTunes” that somehow can get on your “iPod”. Yes, she uses air quotes.

But I don’t think she realizes all of the ways that the internet can improve her day-to-day life. If she needs to find research for a paper she’s writing on childhood development, even the local librarian is going to recommend Google Scholar as a starting point. If she needs a detailed map from St. Louis to Durham, it’s always faster to use Mapquest or Google Maps. If she misses the finale of her favorite show, she should know that they are often available for free on the network’s website.

So it’s time I step in. I can’t say that I understand what moms out there want. And I certainly don’t claim to understand how my mom thinks — AT ALL. But I don’t think that’s necessarily the point. No one has ever taken the time to tell my mom what she should know about the internet — how it can make her life easier. The more time I spend working at Shoeboxed, the more I feel compelled to help my mom see what she’s missing.

So if you want to use the internet—if you want to know how it can make your life easier, here are a few sites that you might want to check out:

Amazingmail.com. Let’s start with the basics. Who doesn’t like to show off the cool places they have visited? Now you can do it easily and cheaply. Upload your digital photos to the computer (the camera should come with instructions…) and make a postcard that you can send to friends. It’s a great alternative to the yearly Christmas card, and the product always looks great. Then check out Ofoto.com where you can print your favorites.

Keycode.com and HotCoupons.com. You might want to sit down for this one. There are online sites that specialize in coupons! Many of the sites offer deals for specific retailers that can’t be found in the weekend newspaper. And don’t think that you can’t find local deals—you can enter your city’s name and “local coupons” into Google and find printable bar codes for your favorite shops.

Iexplore.com. You know something’s good when it’s affiliated with National Geographic. If you want to go on an exciting vacation but don’t have any time to plan it, you should check out this site. It has travel and activity guides for every inch of the globe, with advice on how to get the most out of your vacation. Whether you’re looking to climb a mountain or go sailing, Iexplore can make the appropriate recommendation (based on your experience and the trip’s level of difficulty). It will even recommend pre-screened travel and gear packages.

Rottentomatoes.com. When you’re in the mood for a romantic comedy, do you really trust the opinion of Roger Ebert, Richard Roepert, or Gene Shallot? Of course not. This is a democracy, people—when I’m choosing a movie, I want to hear the opinion of all the qualified critics and film gurus. Next time you’re heading to the cinema, check out rottentomatoes.com. The “Tomatometer” is the most trusted scale when it comes to finding the freshest movie. On a scale from one to ten, anything over a seven is a safe bet.

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You already know that Shoeboxed helps you keep your online receipts organized and your e-mail inbox free from the annoying clutter of spam and advertisements. But as I have learned over the years, there is actually more to life than just the Internet. For this reason, I made a list of a few easy habits that can help you stay organized in all aspects of life.

1. Reduce before you organize. One of the main reasons that people get unorganized is that they just have too much stuff. Since it is much easier to organize 10 things than 100, it’s a good idea to toss out all the items that you don’t need before you start actually organizing. Recycle papers when you can’t remember what they refer to, give old clothes to charity when they don’t fit any longer, and then start organizing that desk or closet.
2. Everything in its right place. Assign specific places for everything, and then make sure to always return items to those places. It’ll be a lot easier to find your sunglasses if you always put them in their “home” rather than just tossing them onto the table somewhere.
3. Take care of things now. Small messes are easier to manage than large ones, so get rid of the “I’ll do it later” mentality and start putting things away right when you’re done with them. That way they won’t build up and leave you with an unmanageable mess on your hands.
4. Write it down. I have personally perfected the talent of forgetting very important pieces of information until just after they are useful, at which point they miraculously come back. To keep this from happening to you, I recommend keeping a calendar or notepad with you and writing down important events as they arise. It is also not a bad idea to periodically go through your notebook and prioritize the things you have written down so you do not get bogged down by unnecessary tasks.
5. Make a system. It is not enough to just clean everything up once—clutter always has a way of coming back. Make a system to stay ahead of the mess. Have a cleaning schedule where you do a little bit every day, have a set method for approaching your paperwork, and put your kids to work. Okay, that last one may not be serious, but it doesn’t hurt to have kids learn the basics of staying organized at a young age.

When you think about it, online shopping is a pretty new development. Just a few short years ago, even the most internet-savvy consumer would have been hesitant about buying anything other than a computer online. We all love to be able to thoroughly inspect things before we buy them (granted, half the time we have absolutely no idea what we’re looking at), so the concept of buying something that you can’t see or touch was a little disconcerting. However, times are changing, and people are now buying more than just electronics online; buying travel tickets and booking hotels online have become commonplace, and last year apparel and accessories beat out computer hardware and software as the top non-travel markets in online retail. In fact, online apparel sales went up 61% in 2005 to a total of $18.3 billion dollars — almost double the total from 2003.

A large part of the increase in popularity of online shopping is due to the fact that people have access to more detailed information regarding various products online. Five years ago, you were lucky if you could see more than one picture of the shoes you were thinking of buying, and chances are those pictures took about half an hour to load. Now, many retailers offer full photo albums for each product, and some even have movies of the product being displayed.

Even with all this progress and growth, though, the Internet still only accounts for about 7% of total retail sales, and research has shown that the meteoric growth of online retail may already be starting to slow. According to Forrester Research, much of the online retail industry’s money goes into minimizing glitches in the transaction process, rather than into the creativity or innovation. It’s time for a change—the online shopping industry has seen some incredible growth in the past few years, but it is going to take some cool new ideas to help make it a truly powerful presence in the retail world. Whatever those ideas may be, Shoeboxed plans to be there all the way, organizing that ever-growing pile of digital receipts. And it’s only just the beginning

Chris Tingom had the right idea when he posted an article entitled “Receipts by Email” on his personal blog [link]. He had recently made a purchase at an Apple Store, and was pleasantly surprised with how they handled his receipt. When he went to the checkout counter, they asked if he wanted a paper receipt or if he would rather have one emailed to him. For the first time he realized what life would be like without paper receipts.

What’s funny is that we all deal with paper receipts on a daily basis. But they still seem like such an insignificant part our life: just a little piece of paper that comes with a new ipod, new shirt, or groceries. They come in handy when you need to return unwanted purchases, but otherwise they are just a pain to organize, store, and track.

But this is the thing: receipts are not an insignificant part of our lives. In fact, if we could just use them correctly, we would save time, money, and make our lives a lot simpler. For Chris, it only took one trip to the Apple Store to realize that there had to be a better way:

Andrew and I spent some time thinking about this and came up with this idea. What if their was a way to associate an email address with your credit card, and then whenever you used your card you could get a receipt in your email? What we need is a way to format this data (xml?) and get a feed for it, and then have shops and stores offer the email or xml feed option in addition to paper receipts.

When you really stop and think about it, we can all imagine this perfect world: one in which all your receipts could be automatically managed for you. You would log online and be able to categorize and organize your purchases. No more wasted paper. No more wasted time.

Well that day is finally here. Shoeboxed.com will automatically manage your receipts, fight spam, and help you get organized. It’s free, it’s easy, and it’s fun.

Sign up below and we’ll shoot you an email when you can start Shoeboxing!