Since I run my own freelance business from home I have to be very careful with all of my receipts to make sure that I am good when it comes to tax season.
At first I kept an accordion folder with all of my receipts, but this became very messy during tax season because some receipts would get really worn down, others were in the wrong month slot and if I ever mixed any of them up it made it even worse. I needed a new method and last year I turned to my trusted Evernote to see if it could do the job.
I started to scan or email a few of my receipts for 2009 directly into Evernote, as the year progressed I started to fine-tune the tags I used and it started to become more useful.
Now a year later Evernote has become my go to storage location for all of my receipts.
How I organize my receipts in Evernote:
- I scan every receipt and put them into a specific folder labeled “Receipts”.
- If I have an Emailed version of a receipt, like iTunes then I will forward it directly to myspecial Evernote email address and append “@Receipts” to the end of the subject line to have it automatically get sent into my Receipts notebook.
- If the receipt is for my business I tag it “Heka Interactive” (the name of my company) and then I add any tags that may fit for that receipt.
When April rolls around it is time to give my accountant a copy of all of my receipts.
- Option 1: Email each receipt to your accountant, one by one
- Option 2: Select multiple notes on the desktop client and e-mail a batch of receipt to your accountant
- Option 3: Select multiple notes on the desktop client, choose print and select Adobe PDF as your printer. This will save your notes to a PDF then you can add all receipts to a cd or thumb drive and give them to your accountant
- Option 4: A more organize option is to use option 1, 2 or 3 and actually send your account your receipts at the end of the month. This does two things for you:
- It makes your account happy because she is not swamped in April
- It makes it possible to figure out how much you will owe when tax seasons comes around
July 5th, 2010 at 5:07 am
Given how sensitive some of your tax information can be, especially tax returns with social security numbers, I would consider scanning anything sensitive into a PDF first, save it with a password, then attach it to EN. Otherwise, the above is very good information, especially about getting information out of EN, a topic rarely discussed. Well done.
Miles
November 27th, 2010 at 8:56 am
That was a really revealing view. Thank you for sharing your thoughts for those of us requiring support :)