QuickBooks has more features than any other expense trackers in this list, and also requires the most knowledge, time, and effort to operate. QuickBooks offers a receipt-scanning function that plugs into the rest of the app’s powerful suite of accounting tools, allowing you to scan receipts, create expense reports, do your bookkeeping and create financial reports and statements all in one dashboard. QuickBooks: For the accounting-savvy business Lots of accounting and expense tracking apps offer digital scanning capabilities, but here we’ll focus on the most popular solutions: QuickBooks, Expensify, Bench, Receipt Bank, and business record scanners. Telling the IRS that “the dog ate my tax records” simply won’t fly. Plus, let’s not forget that paper records can fade, and are susceptible to damage. larger than $75) for at least three years.ĭigitizing your records is also a great way to avoid accidentally tossing them in a move or an overzealous fit of spring cleaning. You’ll know exactly where your money is going every month-so you can cut spending where it’s getting out of hand.ĭue to the Period of Limitations, the IRS also technically requires you to hold on to receipts for significant expenses (i.e.You won’t miss any valuable tax write-offs.When tax time comes, you won’t spend hours sorting through a pile of crumpled receipts wondering whether that $13 parking charge was for a client meeting or a date.Regularly scanning and storing your receipts means that: These “smart receipts” are harder to lose and easier to retrieve, because you can quickly search for them with keywords and filters.ĭigitizing your receipts removes a lot of the hassle involved in your recordkeeping operation. You download them onto your phone, use them to take pictures of your receipts, and then the app’s OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology digitizes all of the text and numbers on those receipts and stores digital versions of them in a filing system. Receipt scanning apps photograph and create digital versions of your receipts, which you can easily retrieve from a digital filing system. Here we’ll go over everything you need to know about receipt digitization apps: why you should incorporate them into your business, how they work, and which one is the best fit for your business.

It might be time to invest in a receipt scanner app. But you can’t do any of these things, because you keep all of your business records in a messy desk drawer, and you’ve lost the receipts for all of them.

Alternative to neat receipts