Best Practices for Managing Paper Receipts
I store all my receipts digitally, and make sure to input them into accounting program sooner than later, just so I don't forget about it. For practical purposes, the two important things are: Any kind of a digital system makes this pretty easy, even just putting the sums in a spreadsheet and the receipts into files with the date in the name. However, because it's easy enough, I also have a box where I stuff the paper receipts. I expect never to need them, but should something very weird happen to my computer and backups, they would be there.
Try the following apps/services: Receipt Bank (paid service, gathers paper receipts, scans them and processes the data), I've tested it, and it recognizing receipts very well, taking picture is very quick and easy, then you can upload the expenses into your accounting software by a click or automatically (e.g. FreeAgent), however the service it's a bit expensive. They've apps for Android and iPhone. Expentory (app and cloud-based service for capturing expense receipts on the move), I'm trying to organize my financial papers as well.  I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap and it's tearing through my papers like a hot knife through butter (i.e. awesome). Here's how I'm addressing organizing the paper. I'm organizing mine a little bit organically.  Here are the main parts: So anyway, all that to say that it's not necessary to organize the files to the hilt.  If you want to, that's fine too, but it's a tradeoff:  up-front organization for possibly some time savings later.  The search function available is decreasing the advantage of organizing your files carefully.  If throwing all of your files in a digital pile makes your skin crawl, then I won't force you otherwise, but I'm not worried about it for the time being. What you're doing with the other tracking sounds fine to me.  Others may have different insights there. You report each position separately. You do this on form 8949. 7 positions is nothing, it will take you 5 minutes. There's a tip on form 8949 that says this, though: For Part I (short term transactions):  Note. You may aggregate all short-term transactions reported on   Form(s) 1099-B showing basis was reported to the IRS and for which no   adjustments or codes are required. Enter the total directly on   Schedule D, line 1a; you are not required to report these transactions   on Form 8949 (see instructions). For Part II (long term transactions): Note. You may aggregate all long-term transactions reported on Form(s)   1099-B showing basis was reported to the IRS and for which no   adjustments or codes are required. Enter the total directly on   Schedule D, line 8a; you are not required to report these transactions   on Form 8949 (see instructions). If the 1099B in your case shows basis for each transaction as reported to the IRS - you're in luck, and don't have to type them all in separately. Depends on the type of documents, if they are just sales flyers you can email/post on website etc.  IF they are medial records or some other sensitive information you need to have something with access controls encryption and logging/auditing capabilities... Some places use sharepoint or just have a shared drive where the docs are stored. First, I try to keep electronic records (with appropriate backups) whenever it seems feasible: utility bills, credit card statements, bank statements, etc. This greatly cuts down on storage space, and are kept forever.  For hard copy records, it depends on the transaction.  I try to balance filing time and recover time, by how likely it is that I will need to access a record in the future.  I'm much less likely to need the receipt for this mornings coffee at Starbucks than I am to need the utility bill for my rental property (100%, come tax time).   For instance, by default I file my credit card receipts, that don't get filed elsewhere, by year with all cards kept together, and cull them after 5-7 years. I keep all of the credit card receipts, just because it is less effort for me than making a decision about what to keep and what to discard.  I put them in an accordion file by month of charge, and keep two, for the current year and previous years. At the beginning of each year, I get rid of the receipts in the oldest file and reuse it. Anything that needs to be kept longer that a couple of years gets filed separately. Certain records are kept together.  For example, car repair/maintenance receipts are filed by vehicle and kept for the life of the vehicle (could be useful when its sold, to provide the repair history).  All receipts for the rental property are kept together, organized by account. I'll keep these until the property is sold. All tax related receipts that don't have a specific file are kept together, by year, along with the tax return. "We're in much the same boat as you.  We do make use of the transaction download feature of our software, but we don't let it auto-enter the amounts.  We use the downloaded transactions to make entering our receipts easier.  We each take responsibility for entering our own transactions, and then I go through and download bills, reconcile statements and such.  I'm the numbers person in our house, so it's easier for me to take care of this stuff.  We have all of our bills on auto-pay so that we don't have to worry about payments not getting made if we don't have time to get to our banking tasks on time.  I try to set aside time on Saturday afternoon while my kids have their ""screen time"", or I'll do it in the evening after the kids are in bed. This year, my wife has been much busier and hasn't had as much time to keep up with her data entry, so we've been doing less well at keeping up with things.  Something we're considering (and this might work for you as well) is to use the envelope system for the categories where we're most in danger of over-spending.  This way. we would have an easy way to see if we'd overspent a category even if we were behind on our data entry.  If you're not familiar with the envelope system, respond here and I'll explain it further." "There is not one right way. It depends on the level of detail that you need. One way would be: Create the following accounts: When you pay the phone bill: When you are paid with the reimbursement: That is, when you pay the phone bill, you must debit BOTH phone expense to record the expense, and also reimbursements due to record the fact that someone now owes you money. If it's useful you could add another layer of complexity: When you receive the bill you have a liability, and when you pay it you discharge that liability. Whether that's worth keeping track of depends. I never do for month-to-month bills. Afterthought: I see another poster says that your method is incorrect because a reimbursement is not salary. Technically true, though that problem could be fixed by renaming the account to something like ""income from employer"". The more serious problem I see is that you are reversing the phone expense when you are reimbursed. So at the end of the year you will show total phone expense as $0. This is clearly not correct -- you did have phone expenses, they were just reimbursed. You really are treating the expense account as an asset account -- ""phone expenses due to be reimbursed by employer""." Attempting to treat every BU as a profit center is doomed for failure.   Some of the record keeping for charge back models are good for data collection and any BU that primarily acts as a profit center can easily do charge backs with other BUs that utilize their services (say a publishing company asking the BU in charge of printing to provide some internal material). If the business function is not a core competency and is not a profit driver it is a cost center and should be treated as such.   For cost center based BUs record keeping, budgeting and controlling your commitments are key however you have a higher chance of being jerked around in some scenarios, this really comes down to the kinds of leadership around the BU. After talking to two CPAs it seems like managing it using an imprest system is the best idea. The base characteristic of an imprest system is that a fixed amount is reserved and later replenished as it runs low.  This replenishment will come from another account source, e.g., petty cash will be replenished by cashing a cheque drawn on a bank account. Petty cash imprest system allows only the replenishment of the spend made. So, if you start the month with €100 in your petty cash float and spend €90 of that cash in the month, an amount of €90 will be then placed in your petty cash float to bring the balance of your petty cash float back to €100. The replenishment is credited to the primary cash account, usually a bank account (Dr - Petty Cash a/c, Cr - Bank a/c) and the debits will go to the respective expense accounts, based on the petty cash receipt dockets (Dr- Expense a/c, Cr - Petty Cash a/c). In a non imprest system where a fixed amount is issued every month, e.g., €100 every time cash is required, there is no incentive to ensure all money issued has been documented because when money is all spent a check for a fixed amount is issued. It is much more difficult to reconcile a non imprest system as you never know how much exactly should be in the float. In an imprest system the amount requested is documented, the documentation being the petty cash dockets and their associated receipts or invoices. So at all times you can check how much should be left in the petty cash float by deducting the amount spent from the opening petty cash float. "Your debits and credits are perfect. Now, it comes down to a choice of how you want your accounts organized, financially speaking. In terms of taxes, it's recommended you keep a separate set of books just like a corporation and account for them strictly according to law. It's best not to credit phone expenses since it will no longer show on your net reports.  A better alternative would be ""Phone reimbursement"".  With that, you can not only see if you've been compensated but also how much you're personally managing these expenses by checking the annual ""Phone expense"" account. This is all up to personal preference, but so long as you're properly balancing your accounts, you can introduce any level of resolution you wish.  I prefer total resolution when it comes to financial accounting. Also, it is not good practice to debit away ""Salary"".  The net of this account will be lower and distorted.  An expense reimbursement is not salary anyways, so the proper bookings will follow below. Finally, if GnuCash is calling ""Salary"" an income account, this is unfortunate.  The proper label would be ""revenue"" since ""income"" is a net account of expenses from revenue in the income identity. Entries With this, your books will become clearer: your cash assets will remain as clear as you had organized them, but now your income statement will provide higher resolution." Some other ratios:  * Cost per customer (expenses divided by attendance) * Attendance variance year over year * Payroll minutes per patron  Not sure if those help. They have a bunch of smaller performance tracking stats from % of waste from inventory to employee performance.   From talking with my roommate, the theater industry sounds awfully familiar to how the hotel industry tracks it's performance. The hotel industry tracks performance based on occupancy and room revenue. Theaters track performance based on attendance and concession revenue. "I think the ""right"" way to approach this is for your personal books and your business's books to be completely separate. You would need to really think of them as separate things, such that rather than being disappointed that there's no ""cross transactions"" between files, you think of it as ""In my personal account I invested in a new business like any other investment"" with a transfer from your personal account to a Stock or other investment account in your company, and ""This business received some additional capital"" which one handles with a transfer (probably from Equity) to its checking account or the like. Yes, you don't get the built-in checks that you entered the same dollar amount in each, but (1) you need to reconcile your books against reality anyway occasionally, so errors should get caught, and (2) the transactions really are separate things from each entity's perspective. The main way to ""hack it"" would be to have separate top-level placeholder accounts for the business's Equity, Income, Expenses, and Assets/Liabilities. That is, your top-level accounts would be ""Personal Equity"", ""Business Equity"", ""Personal Income"", ""Business Income"", and so on. You can combine Assets and Liabilities within a single top-level account if you want, which may help you with that ""outlook of my business value"" you're looking for. (In fact, in my personal books, I have in the ""Current Assets"" account both normal things like my Checking account, but also my credit cards, because once I spend the money on my credit card I want to think of the money as being gone, since it is. Obviously this isn't ""standard accounting"" in any way, but it works well for what I use it for.) You could also just have within each ""normal"" top-level placeholder account, a placeholder account for both ""Personal"" and ""My Business"", to at least have a consistent structure. Depending on how your business is getting taxed in your jurisdiction, this may even be closer to how your taxing authorities treat things (if, for instance, the business income all goes on your personal tax return, but on a separate form). Regardless of how you set up the accounts, you can then create reports and filter them to include just that set of business accounts. I can see how just looking at the account list and transaction registers can be useful for many things, but the reporting does let you look at everything you need and handles much better when you want to look through a filter to just part of your financial picture. Once you set up the reporting (and you can report on lists of account balances, as well as transaction lists, and lots of other things), you can save them as Custom Reports, and then open them up whenever you want. You can even just leave a report tab (or several) open, and switch to it (refreshing it if needed) just like you might switch to the main Account List tab. I suspect once you got it set up and tried it for a while you'd find it quite satisfactory." You need receipts only if you claim deductions in the itemized deductions section based on them. You itemize deductions only if your claims exceed the standard deduction (which for a single person was $5,800 last year). Even then, you need receipts for everything only if you claim sales tax as the deduction (you have to buy really a lot to pass $5K with sales tax...). I would expect people to pay more in state income taxes than sales taxes (you can claim either this or that, not both). For food - there are no taxes (at least here in California), so nothing to deduct anyway. In any case, you can always scan your receipts and keep them in the computer, for just in case, but IMHO it's waste of time, pixels and gigabytes. Here's a question which deals with the same issue, read the answers there as well. I'd imagine you want to keep the utility bills around to dispute any historical billing errors or anomalies for perhaps 6 months to a year. Beyond that, you always have the financial records of making the payments -- namely, your bank statements. So what benefit is there in keeping the paper receipts for utility payments around for longer than that? I say shred them, with extreme prejudice -- while wearing black Chuck Norris style. "I think the survey needs to be broken down to ""as a consumer..."" and ""as a merchant...""  I'm not sure any service like the one you propose can be really implemented on the consumer side.   In particular, I suspect few if any consumers would pay for the privilege  You might look into the company ""Neat"" who sold a specialized scanner and software package designed around organizing reciepts a while back.   Retailer buy-in is a huge factor too.  You can create a platform and encourage retailers to send reciepts via email or whatever, but at the end of the day, a lot of retailers still see value in a reciept 5x as long as it should be to itemize the 22 ways you ""saved money"" and the 19 cross-promotions or coupons they want to inform you of.    Unless you can provide equal percieved value for them, they won't be interested, even if consumers like the concept.  The classic example in this debate is the US chain ""CVS Pharmacy""-- whose long reciepts are the butt of many jokes, but persist because they're part of an elaborate reward scheme where they give people coupons in the hopes of them coming back to use them.  As for the smaller vendors who may not be as tied to such strategies, they're also likely going to be less technically equipped to cope with  a new feature.  You almost need to target the POS vendors like NCR and IBM-- if you can make ""electronic reciept"" a feature in their platform, it becomes something that hundreds of stores are getting built into their systems for ""free"" and they just have to turn it on.  That's a lot easier than selling to every single retailer one at a time, and it would be a big enough launch that you could start to get customer preference"