Last August our team began speaking with Shoeboxed users to better understand how you all are using our service and what we could do to make it better.

Six months and hundreds of phone calls later, we arrived at a very clear picture of what you both love about Shoeboxed and what you would like to see improved.

The #1 request we received focused on our web app’s search functionality and the ability to locate specific receipts fast and accurately.

Some specific statements we heard were:

“The search results are less than ideal. Typically I’m searching for a vendor or something specific and your search results don’t always locate the receipt even though I know it’s in my account.”

“Date range search does not work well.”

“When I go into the web app and try to search for a receipt or an invoice, I can’t really find it easily. I’m hoping it’s there, but I worry if I need to track down a specific invoice or receipt I won’t be able to find it because the search is not awesome.” 

We took all of your feedback to heart and got to work! Our team spent two months perfecting our search algorithm and we think you’re going to find it very useful.

Here’s what’s changed:

Searching by Vendor

  • You no longer have to be mindful of capitalization, punctuation or even general spelling when trying to locate a receipt based on the vendor name.
  • The “fuzzy search” algorithm makes it extremely simple to find receipts based on vendor. For example, a receipt from “Nana’s” can by located by searching for any variation of: “Nanas” “nanas” “Nana” “Nana’s” and even “Mana’s.”
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Searching by Amount

  • The ability to find receipts based on a total amount is a critical component of Shoeboxed.
  • Our refined search makes it easy to locate receipts with or without typing a currency symbol. Some common searches would include queries like: “$45.67” “301.12” and “£134.”
  • If you aren’t sure of an exact total on a receipt, you can also search for a general amount such as “$200” and receipts within $100 of that amount will appear.
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Searching by Date

  • Locating receipts by searching for a date used to be a bit cumbersome since date searches would sometimes be interpreted as amount searches.
  • This has been completely alleviated. Simply search using the date syntax of “12/03/2015” or “23/01/2014”
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As always, a huge thank you to Shoeboxed users! We couldn’t have made these improvements to search without your wonderful feedback.

With that in mind, we’d love to continue to hear your thoughts on Shoeboxed web search. If you have any specific feedback or feature requests you would like to see added, please be sure to let us know.

You might like: The Ultimate Receipt Organization & Management Resource

About Shoeboxed!

Shoeboxed is a receipt scanning service that supports multiple methods for receipt capture: send, scan, upload, forward, and more!

You can stuff your receipts into one of our Magic Envelopes (prepaid postage within the US). Use our receipt app (iPhone, iPad and Android) to snap a picture while on the go. Auto-import receipts from Gmail. Or forward a receipt to your designated Shoeboxed email address.

Turn your receipts into data and deductibles with our expense reports that include IRS-accepted receipt images.

Join over 1 million businesses scanning & organizing receipts, creating expense reports and more—with Shoeboxed.

Try Shoeboxed today!