Keeping Track of Your Expenses
If you travel for business, you have to keep track of your expenses. If you are the owner, that “boss” called the Internal Revenue Service is likely to ask for your travel and entertainment expense documentation.
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Neat Receipts |
There is a program called Neat Receipts that comes with a nice portable sheet fed scanner that can take receipts, documents to save, even business cards. If you scan a receipt, say from Office Depot, it keeps the image for the IRS. It then converts the image to text using optical character recognition. Then, knowing the receipt is from Office Depot (because it recognizes the name), it can automatically determine the format of the receipt and enter the right amounts for office supplies and taxes, etc.
The program seems to have a large collection of receipts it can automatically recognize so when you scan one, all the work, even down to classifying what expense category the receipt is for, is done automatically. When you get home, you can print an expense report, or export the data to another program.
Source: Adapted from Gregg Marshall, CPMR, CSP
