Reduce your stress by automating your receipts

This year, I promised myself that I would stay on top of my expenses. No more would I allow unclaimed receipts to clutter up my wallet for months on end. With this goal in mind, I installed and tested around 15 different ‘mobile receipt’ apps to find the one that was the most flexible while also being easy to use. The winner was Receipt Catcher Pro for $3.79.

I travel a lot and incur small business expenses every week. Most of it is typical travel costs: a train here, some parking and every now and then a cup of coffee with clients. If your expenses are in any way similar to mine, then you are also likely no stranger to having a wallet or purse full of receipts. You likely also dread the monthly expense claims process so that you can be reimbursed by your business.

With Receipt Catcher Pro, much of the pain of monthly expense reports is now completely removed. My monthly expense process is now simple, quick and painless.

Let’s say I’m travelling and I incur an expense purchasing a lunch for myself and a client. I open the app, take a photo of the receipt and record details for the expense next to it. At the end of the month, I select the receipts I want and export an expense report containing all the photos of the receipts which each match to a row in the expense report. In addition, I can export a CSV file. I later open it in Microsoft Excel and from there I shuffle a few columns, do a little cutting and pasting and, voila, my expenses are now in the company’s approved Excel spreadsheet claim format.

So what for me used to be a slow and painful process that typically took around two hours a month now takes me just 20 minutes.