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!

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!

Another feature requested by users is now available on Shoeboxed! Because there are many features on Shoeboxed, and many powerful tools for organizing your scanned and emailed receipts, it’s easy to forget each one.

To help explain everything a little better, head on over to our new demo video.

https://www.shoeboxed.com/demo-video.htm

Send this link along to your friends to help them get to know Shoeboxed!

Oh don’t we all hate the dreaded expense report? All those business receipts burning a hole in your wallet, just waiting to be turned into your  accountant or controller so you can get reimbursed for your business expenses. The dry cleaning receipt, the dinner receipt, the office supplies receipt. All of them need to be turned in, but they’re hard to find (or they’re missing), they’re torn, or they’re faded.

We’ve all been there: having to eat an expense that you should be reimbursed for just because you didn’t turn in all your receipts. Twenty bucks here and there isn’t the end of the whole. It’s not breaking the bank necessarily, but it doesn’t have to happen. You can say goodbye to that inconvenience.

The personal budget forms, also known as expense reports, that you turn into your business can be a breeze with Shoeboxed. Instead of keeping your receipts in different places and losing them, you can stick them straight into a Receipt Mail-In envelope, mail them from anywhere for free to the Shoeboxed headquarters, and never worry about them again.

In a couple of days, your receipts will be online for you to view, organize, and print. You can create expense reports in one click, and you’ll even get the originals back under most plans.

Your business receipts: we’ve got them covered.

As we all know, taxes are not once-a-year activity. In order to keep tabs on all your tax documents, including receipts and bank statements, you have keep them organized on an ongoing basis throughout the year.

This doesn’t sound very fun, right? I’m sure some of you are wondering how this would even be possible. Won’t you have to get an administrative assistant to handle all this paper work?

The answer is no!

With Shoeboxed, you can head to HR Block or JacksonHewitt next March with the confidence that you have all your receipts organized. You will also be relieved that you will be able to breathe easy if you are ever audited by the IRS.

Well, that’s where Shoeboxed comes in. You’ll be able to outsource all that administrative work of organizing your receipts to Shoeboxed. We’ll scan your receipts and upload them to a secure account online. You will have them for all your tax needs. They are exportable to tax software, Quicken and Excel. You can also print them to have them in paper form.

HR Block and JacksonHewitt will probably thank you for saving them from all that administrative work that they now don’t have to do.

There are a lot different ways to keep a budget. Using receipt software might not always be the first thing that people think of when they start to get serious about better budgeting, but it can be a powerful tool to help you see where your money is going. Receipts have the original line-item data about what exactly you purchase, and can easily tell you exactly what you have been spending your money on.

In the past, it has been difficult to budget by organizing receipts. Free receipt scanning software like Shoeboxed can really help, though. You can organized, categorize, and export all your receipts easily in one place. Statistics are automatically generated about your receipts and your spending habits, which can help you in your budgeting.

Along with the receipt software on Shoeboxed.com, you can sign up for Receipt Mail-In, which makes it easier to keep track of every single receipt that you have. All those pesky paper receipts can be organized in your Shoeboxed account. By making it easy to get all your receipts in one place, Receipt Mail-In is a great budgeting tool and a great addition to the free receipt scanning software portion of Shoeboxed.com.

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!

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve talked with a bunch of people that were really convinced that they needed to start scanning all their receipts. I think the idea of having all your receipts all in one place in digital form is a really good idea. Check out our Why Scan Receipts page to get the whole argument for why this kind of data backup is critically important.

But scanning your own receipts is a commitment. It is not easy to scan hundreds of receipts a month by yourself. The average desktop or portable scanner is not designed to be a really fast way to scan a lot of receipts very quickly.

Keeping a New Year’s Resolution that you are going to scan in every paper receipt you ever get is really hard. Buying a new scanner or spending money on receipt organization software is kind of like buying gym equipment from an infomercial: the idea of achieving that goal (whether it be receipt organization or perfect abs) sounds great, but it requires a lot of work, and people often lose focus and commitment.

Say you start the year off by buying a $200 scanner, and then two weeks later you fall back into the daily grind that prevents you from having a few hours a week to scan in receipts. That’s not to hard to imagine. You are then stuck with a $200 loss, and the same pile of receipts that you started with.

What you need is something that can help you keep organized throughout the year. In my mind, the best way to accomplish your receipt scanning goals is to take away all the work. With Shoeboxed Receipt Mail-In, you can do just that. Just mail us your receipts, we’ll scan them in and upload them to your secure Shoeboxed account for you, and then we mail them back to you. You can access them anytime and organize them to your liking and needs.

If you know how to send a letter in the mail, you know how to get your receipts organized. You never have to touch a scanner with Receipt Mail-In.

Now if only we could find a solution that’s that simple for your abs…