I have a problem trying to store all my receipts in an orderly fashion. Invoices are pretty simple to file in a hanging file folder in my filing cabinet. But I shop weekly at Restaurant Depot and Sam’s Club where I get a more standard consumer-like receipt that is hard to file. It becomes a big bundled mess in the hanging file. Especially if we need to keep these for years in case we get audited. Does anyone else have this problem? Any ideas on how to keep them more orderly and neat?
I’m assuming, considering how behind technology the government is, that I can’t scan them and save them in a file, can I? That would be ideal. I could just scan all invoices after they’re 6 mo or so old and then print them out if I ever need to for the IRS. But that would make too much sense probably. Any help would be appreciated.
I scan all of my receipts and keep them in folders name by company. The scans have date stamps for easy identification. I keep the hard copies grouped by week in a box in case I ever need hard copies. I also record all transactions in Quickbooks.
Receipts for what? We get a handful of grocery receipts if we run out of something like romain and get some from safeway and we get gas receipts for the company cars but that is pretty much it. We staple those to the daily from the day we get them and that is it.
All other invoices from utility companies, phone company, food vendors, pepsi etc etc we put in large manila envelopes by month, never look at them again and throw them out after few years. One bankers box easily holds a year’s worth of these manila envelopes as well as the full year’s payroll reports.
My experience is that in 16 years I have NEVER once had to produce a receipt for anything so I am not very interested in going to a lot of trouble to organize them. Now days nearly all of them are paid by credit card so the card statement to a known vendor is really my “go-to” for proof of payment. When I do my taxes I take the totals from the CC statement not the invoices. If someone questions my purchases someday I can still pull them out and find them but it has never happened.
You want to know what I bought from US food for September 2012? Here is the bag for all invoices etc for that month. You mention restaurant depot receipts etc… I would just bag em up. If the IRS audits you they are going to be looking for how you don’t report income or write off personal expenses etc… sorting through bags of restaurant depot receipts for legitimate business food purchases would serve them right!
Probably half of my total store inventory comes from either Rest Depot/Sams/Walmart. I mostly just need my invoices and receipts kept for tax purposes. Everything is also entered into Quickbooks. It is my understanding that we need to save these receipts for tax purposes for 7 years in case we are audited. We use the Quickbooks reports for doing our year end taxes.
I just scan everything and keep two different backups in different locations for all my digital files (both offsite).
Physical files go into a vanilla folder monthly, then into a bankers box yearly. Then after a few years that whole box goes to the shredder. If i ever need to reproduce anything i always have the digital scans.
I produce a lot of receipts as well, daily paperwork gets stacked in a box thats’ roughly 8x11 so as to be a fairly tight fit… in between said paperwork is whatever receipts I rack up on that day (or whatever day I enter them into QB). Everything of course goes into quickbooks… emailed receipts go into specific folders in my email, and I can get about 5-6 months out of one of these boxes and than I just move onto another one. I used to just put them in a filing cabinet and at years end stuff them into manilla envelopes sorted by type but it just became a giant mess so now everything goes in the same box and I’m thinking of getting rid of my filing cabinet for something small enough for employee folders and misc crap like health reports etc. If anyone ever wants to go through them, I’ll give them the box and tell them to have at it. It’s all there… and I’m sure those IRS guys are pro at going through much worse of a mess than I can produce.