Who doesn’t get excited for tax time?!!!! Ok. Maybe it’s just me.
Do you find yourself running around like a crazy person come tax time? Scrambling to find invoices, receipts on laptops, in your wallet, your car or random shoe boxes?
Do you end up wondering how much time and stress you could have saved yourself?
Well, look no further. I have compiled a short list of the best expense tracking apps to help you get your financial act together!
Shoeboxed:
Use the Shoeboxed app to scan receipts and track mileage. The app takes the most important information from the receipt: the merchant, the payment method, total amount, and the date of the purchase.
What makes Shoeboxed great for tax filing compared to the other receipt trackers is that you can indicate whether each expense is deductible. When it’s tax time, you can easily export deductible expenses and receipts for your tax preparer.
Shoeboxed also allows you to mark expenses as reimbursable for easy expense tracking for your employers. Automatically import receipts from Gmail. Create expense reports from within the app and send them directly from your phone without having to export to your computer or print them out.
For mileage reimbursements, you can track mileage easily with the GPS function on your smartphone. If you need to, you can export expenses to a variety of accounting software, including QuickBooks, Outright, Wave Accounting, and Excel.
Con: If you scan items for reasons other than saving receipts, you are limited to saving as a PDF, with very few other options.
Expensify:
Expensify is one of the most widely known receipt tracking apps. Expensify can submit receipts to your manager, collect receipts from clients, and track your personal expenses.
After using your smartphone to take a picture of your receipt, the SmartScan feature automatically reads any important details. You can add a category to each receipt, then tag and group expenses for expense reporting.
In addition to tracking expenses, the app also includes mileage and time tracking. As a manager receiving expense reports from employees, you have the ability to approve or reject expense reports. Approved expense reports can be reimbursed via next-day direct deposit.
Con: The receipt-scanning feature isn’t always completely accurate, so double-check for accuracy.
Neat:
Neat is a complete filing system with a physical scanner, scanning app for your smartphone, and online account access. The app accesses your smartphone’s camera to scan receipts, then extracts the most important information, saving you the time and effort of entering these details separately.
If you need to give someone else access to your receipts your manager or – business partner, for example – you can share your receipts and expenses with necessary parties by providing view-only access to specific folders. The system even has the capability of storing comments on each expense item.
You can also upload PDFs, images, and electronic receipts from your computer and file these right along with the receipts you’ve scanned from your smartphone. Sync your data across devices so that you can access your files from anywhere. You can quickly and easily create expense reports from your smartphone or tablet using the data from your receipts with a summary of your spending and an itemized list of your expenses.
Con: Neat isn’t the most cost-effective option, although it does offer three payment plan levels.
Receipts by wave:
Receipts by Wave is a great receipt tracking app for small business owners and freelancers who need to keep up with receipts, invoices, and bills. The app does require you to also use Wave’s free accounting software, which provides additional functionality for expense tracking and report creation.
Use the app to take pictures of your receipts and it then utilizes optical character recognition technology to pull vital details from the receipt like the merchant, payment method, and total. The receipt details and image are imported to your Wave account. You can also upload receipts from other locations, including Google Drive, Dropbox, and Skydrive.
Receipts are stored in the cloud, allowing you access from your smartphone or computer whenever you need it. Receipt capture capabilities are available both online and offline. If you store a receipt while you’re offline, it will be updated to your Wave account as soon as your device is connected to the internet again. You can also forward any email receipts to have them included in your account as well.
Con: You can only upload documents while online, so you might have to save your receipts and enter them in batches if your connection’s spotty.
Veryfi:
Eliminate manual entry of your receipts by using Veryfi to scan receipts whether your device is online or offline. The app processes receipts in under 10 minutes. Keep your receipts organized so they’re easier to access for tax time. Veryfi takes privacy a step beyond other receipt tracking apps with its HIPAA and GDPR data privacy compliance.
Create report and export reports in both PDF and Excel formats for offline tracking and review. You can also sync the app with several other storage, productivity, accounting, and payroll apps to make it more powerful.
Quickbooks, Dropbox, Xero, Slack, Google Drive, and Office 365 are just a handful of the possible integrations. To make it easier to manage your receipts from multiple locations, you can also access your account via the Web app with the same username and password that you use for your smartphone app.