Eliminate Paper Receipts

Like most of you, around this time every year, I prepare for the filing of my tax return and if you are self-employed like I am, you know how much of a laborious task this can be.

One my biggest chores in this process, is to go through the year's receipts. I suppose if you are disciplined you probably file them away as soon as you get them during the year, by category. Meal receipts with meal receipts, gasoline receipts with gasoline receipts, etc. But if you are like I am, you the receipts into an envelope in clumps without any organization at all. They are cumbersome because of the different lengths and widths; and they are often times wrinkled and smudged.

Of course, over the last years, more and more merchants have been offering digital receipts in conjunction with the paper receipts that get delivered via email. I always opt for the digital choice available because not are the digital receipts so much easier to handle, but also because the paper receipts tend to disintegrate over time. By the time tax season comes around, of them are illegible, faded out and useless. I download the emailed digital receipts on my laptop and save them in a folder on my external hard drive. Because of this, I have been moving towards a paperless receipt filing system. This year, , I decided to go digital. That is, to the digital receipts received from merchants, I am also now storing images of the paper receipts that I receive throughout the year. And with the help of a free app called DocOCR that I downloaded to my phone.

Sure. I know scanner products on the market that are specifically engineered for the imaging and archival of receipts. If you have any of those and like them, that's great. Good for you. DocOCR works well for me because of the way I work, not always being in the same place, and also, because I am not technologically sophisticated. My gear: my iPhone and my PC laptop. (By the way, I am not getting compensation of any kind from the folks who make DocOCR).

DocOCR is a free scanning app that I downloaded to my iPhone which uses optical character recognition (OCR) technology. I am sure a comparable version for droid phones is out there somewhere.

This is how I do it. First, I open the DocOCR app and take a picture of the receipt. Then, the app allows editing of the shape of the receipt, allowing the ability to discard any edges of background that might be showing. Then, the app shows the stored image of the receipt, and it automatically compensates for wrinkles, heightens the contrast and saves it as a PDF file. Next, I email the PDF to myself and then I open my email on my laptop. After downloading the now digital receipt I save it to a folder on my external hard drive that is designated for receipts. Then, I name the file in this manner:the date (for example, January 1, 2021, would be 010121), the name of the merchant and the amount of the transaction. (I like to put the amount of the receipt in the file name as it helps speed up the process when adding expenses at tax time because you do not have to open the file). Lastly, the scanned receipt can be deleted from the app (it will not appear in the Photo folder on your phone) and the receipt can be shredded.