Effortlessly Manage Your Taxi Receipt Format for Management

Taxi receipt format for Management

receipt management can be really overwhelming both for bookkeepers and for business owners so i know oftentimes people have stacks of receipts or files and folders and they just don't really know how to organize them or what to do so today i'm going to go through my very best tips and tricks about receipt organization either digitally or manually and this is part two of my receipt management series so in the first part it was basically a tutorial of how to work in quickbooks with their receipt function that's kind of newer in the last like couple years so today i'm gonna go more into actually how to organize receipts and give you both digital and paper options my name is morgan from finepoints.biz and my goal is to help get organized make sure you hit the red subscribe button down below to get a new video for me each week and a thumbs up helps me out a ton as well so i'd asked you guys in one of my previous videos if you were interested in receipt management and more about that and a bunch of you guys said you were and it ended up working out really great because epson reached out to me and they sent me this new product it's called the rapid receipt scanner and it does go really fast um and then there's a little cute mini rapid receipt scanner that you can use um like on the go so if you're like out and about you can scan receipts through this guy so i'm going to tell you a little bit more about how to use those in a bit so they're partnering with me today on this video and i'm going to give you um my genuine opinions on how i like these products and how i'd use them in my bookkeeper workflow and i did film this in a couple of different areas of my house so i'm going to first talk to you about kind of the background of receipts and how i work with them all right so the first thing i'm going to talk about is how i deal with receipts in my business or my clients businesses um kind of like history of receipts and what it's looked like in the past and why and then two different options for how to organize them depending on the size of your client's business all right so how i personally set up my business is i do not offer receipt organization especially not paper physical receipt organization as one of my services i do not prefer to do it i've done it in the past and i don't like shuffling through a lot of papers and um it's just not my style i know a lot of bookkeepers are now very virtual and it is becoming more and more common to that that's okay that you don't have to do receipt management if you don't want to i do do it for a couple clients on quickbooks online as i mentioned in my other video and have them email the receipts directly into quickbooks so i'm never touching the paper that does take more time pretty significantly more time and effort just because there's often like problems in the matching so i will chart a higher rate for that and make sure that i'm you know fairly compensated for the time that i'm spending in that i'm just a little bit of a history i think the reason that receipt management is kind of a thing that people connect with bookkeepers is because in the past we are entering a lot of data from physical things so someone would give us a paper invoice or a receipt or a checkbook or a deposit book or some kind of paper and then we would take it a bookkeeper would take it you know and enter it into quickbooks desktop probably or even before that into paper accounting ledgers so businesses are still required to save receipts and to save documentation from the irs for the irs i guess i should say so if a business owner is organized and they know they need to do this a bookkeeper would be kind of a logical person to do it but that's just kind of like a service and a workflow thing you can work out in your business and with your clients so as a bookkeeper your kind of options are you could say no i do not organize receipts you can say yes i do in only in quickbooks or you can say yes i will take your receipts and i'll organize them for you in paper files and i will use i'll be in charge of making of keeping those like backup documents you guys know that i always prefer digital resources to paper anytime i can i'll always choose digital um i don't like sorting paper i don't like dealing with paper i don't like having to go to clients you know offices to get paper um so that's why i love this rapid receipt scanner because you can digitize everything really quickly so i never really used a receipt scanner before i could see it being totally game changing in my bookkeeper workflow especially if you're someone who charges your client to manage receipts because that is definitely a time commitment that you want to be well compensated for so this rapid receipt scanner was really easy to set up so i basically just turned it on and it kind of like walked me through a bunch of prompts so and it connected with my the wi-fi in my house and then it was really easy to wirelessly connect it to my computer and so in the instructions it has the website you go to to download their software and it was super easy like i mean i'm like not particularly techie um but it was really easy to use the software took a little bit of time to like run in the background of my computer but i just did something else while it was setting up and then again it kind of walks you through each of the steps and i just generally like like the the size of this like it's not too heavy not too light this thing i totally think it's like so like adorable i don't know why i'm like really into it but but basically i feel like they did a good job just like designing the product so there's a lot of different like workflows you could use so here's what i would do i would have my client you know kind of keep their receipts and their documents in a stack for a while because they probably don't want to scan it that much and then once i had like a pile every month or every few weeks i would run it through the scanner and have all of the images digitally upload into their program and it does integrate to quickbooks so when your client has that stack of receipts they feed them through here i'm going to show you some footage of how it like scans through here and then goes into your computer and what you do once you're in there so you can see i have a bunch of different receipts all different shapes and sizes and it does do pretty well with this um i'm just gonna scan these single sided because i don't really need what's on the back i'm just gonna kind of put them in a little pile here and then you put them in face down i'm pretty sure and then you just hit computer you can also do this from your computer and then one-sided and start okay then you come over here to your computer screen you can click scan either from the scanner or from your computer and then they've come in here and you hit next and then it takes a little bit to import them um so you can see here i would need to play around a little bit because i did the front and the back so i have extras but you can see this one receipt here i can rotate it so it is the right way and then the vendor is new seasons and it will learn your vendors which is nice um you can see these are the vendors that imported so far but if i you know had another one from new seasons it would come through so that is good and then it didn't read any um it didn't read the dollar amount so that's 1849 and i'm not sure how this works i mean i haven't played around with it a ton a ton but if you know different types of receipts or invoices it would do a better job at this one's kind of old so it does kind of um you know parts of it are wearing off all right so then once you kind of get these as you like them um you can export it and this is one of my favorite things so you can export it to quickbooks online which would be probably my workflow desktop quicken turbo tax a cvs file or an image file so an image file would probably be helpful if you didn't want to manage receipts on quickbooks online for whatever reason maybe you think it's harder to do it which i could see both sides of that so if you don't want to use quickbooks online you could put it into an image file and then you can and i'm pretty sure it is findable or if that is the right word but that you can it will read the data in that image file and so you can search for a vendor or things like that and um then later in the video i'm going to talk about good ways to organize these documents digitally similar to how you might do it um in a paper file so i just love that it integrates to quickbooks online i didn't show this part but i logged into my quickbooks to test it out to see what it does and it creates an expense in quickbooks online so how i would manage that is when the expense comes through in the bank feeds it's just going to match that existing expense that you already have because originally i thought maybe that when you uploaded it to quickbooks it would show up in the receipts tab but it actually just creates the expense for you which is great you've already checked all the info and the amount so that should hopefully save you some steps when it comes in through the bank feeds and if you're totally lost about what i'm talking about you might want to again watch part one to this video when i really talk about that receipt tab and how the receipts function within quickbooks and just a quick tip i do recommend having your client write on the receipt what it's for so if they want it in a certain category that is really helpful to write on there or if it's a meal also so if it's a meal have them write on on there who they had their meal with because business owners aren't allowed to just like deduct meals for like when they're just eating out which sometimes you have to educate clients on that have them right who the meal was with and then you should already have the date and the restaurant name and what they ordered and the tip should be on there as well so anytime you can train your clients to write as much information on receipts that's going to help you out a lot so i definitely encourage you to check out this rapid receipt scanner think about how it's going to work into your workflow because i really feel like it could save you a lot of time and effort especially i just thought about this if you are doing like a ketchup so if you have like like years of old documents that you're trying to get scanned in this is gonna save you so much more time than like taking a bunch of pictures or like doing each one individually so i know no one really loves to deal with receipts but i mean we're required to from the irs and if you ever get audited that is you know just a reality that you have to deal with so this guy on this little little guy too is going to help you out a lot i didn't get into this one as much but this one you can scan in and it will feed to the same program so you can use these both simultaneously like one on the go and one in your office the newest the bookkeeper can be managing stuff in quickbooks and in there like on the computer okay and then how to organize those receipts after they are on your computer or if you decide not to digitize them and you just are doing them um paper copies there is different ways you can do it and kind of the ways i have spelled out or either by month by vendor or kind of like a hybrid of both of those and one other thing about scanning you don't have to connect it to quickbooks if you don't want to manage your receipts within quickbooks that might be an extra step that you don't want to deal with you can still scan in all the receipts and make a digital folders that i'm going to talk about next so instead of you know all the paper a paper filing cabinet you can do the exact same thing digitally which way is much my preference kind of the two ways that i see things organized is either by month or by vendor so if you want to do it by month and this is also something information you can give to your clients if they're like oh but how do i organize my receipts if they're probably a smaller business with less than like 100 transactions per month they can just have a file folder with every month january through december and as they get receipts they can just put them in that month and then in theory if you you know if you're looking for a certain receipt or a certain invoice you can you know go into quickbooks be like okay this is from december and then go in your december folder and find that document so of course the pro to this is it's very easy to file the con is that it might be a little bit harder to find things if there's more in each file alright and then another way to do things is to organize by vendor so i worked at a very organized nonprofit that was pretty paper heavy so they had a piece of paper basically for every single deposit and every single transaction so i was required when you know we got a deposit i would print out the sheet from quickbooks and attach it to another piece of paper so very heavy paper system but they were very organized and it worked well for them so in that case anytime we got an invoice from a vendor so we had to pay the electric bill or you know i was in charge of all these so i had to pay the electric bill i had to pay um you know different any vendor that would come come in so the water person like i can't even think of all the vendors but there was a bunch so and i think i've touched on this briefly but people do ask me this a lot just kind of the workflow and then was for those particular paper pieces of paper is um it would come in the mail it would be approved by the department head and then it would come to my desk and then i would enter it as a check into quickbooks i would print off the checks then i would mail them to the vendor and then after that i think i had to attach something maybe to the to the invoice to say that i paid it i can't remember that for sure um and then i would file it in this big filing cabinet so that they had all the vendors alphabetized a to z and i think there was like two or three drawers full of them so a lot of vendors and then i could put you know i would put i'd try to organize them you know usually you get one invoice per month so then you know it would be comcast so then hopefully in the little file folder for comcast would be january february march april may and that like in order within there and then of course the pros to that is it's very easy to find something so maybe you have a question about the comcast bill like something went weird and you're trying to sort out where the problem was so just grab the comcast folder you can see exactly what was what they charged you each month and how much you paid and make sure everything's lining up and the con i guess would be it is harder to manage that it's more work you know and if you have a vendor that only comes sporadically you might not want a whole folder so you can have to like think through some of those things but in general especially if you're a large business i definitely say that is a great organized way to do it and then you could also probably do like a hybrid of those two as well so you could mostly do it by you know with big folders with each month and then maybe you have like 10 vendors that you want to pull out separate and because maybe you know that there's often problems with those or questions so you have individualized folders for comcast for the water bill for whatever else definitely it's important to analyze the business and what the needs of the business are what problems may arise and how big it is and who is doing it it might depend on the person's preference too so let me know in the comments if you have any other questions about receipts or filing paperwork or anything like that i'll do my best to answer and don't forget to give this video a thumbs up that is a huge compliment to me thank you guys so much for watching and subscribe for another bookkeeping video next week thanks so much bye