Scan Receipts Without A Scanner
If you run any kind of business (freelance, a company etc), you’ll need to keep receipts for any purchases made under the name of your business. The problem with keeping receipts is that the ink wear out very quickly. In the course of one year when it’s time to do your taxes, you’ll realize that most of your receipts become unreadable.
Scanning receipts and keeping them digitally, either on a dedicated folder on your Mac, or attach them in a finance software like Cha-Ching, can be a much better idea. But most people don’t like the idea of spending too much time scanning receipts with their scanner (steps include powering up the scanner, loading a preview and scan). Yes you can conveniently use Shoeboxed to scan your receipts for you if you don’t mind forking out a monthly fee ($9.95/month to start).
2 iPhone Apps To Digitize Your Receipts
If you have an iPhone, you only need to get two apps (5 bucks in total) to handle the digitizing of your receipts:
JotNot Scan
[$3.99 | Website | iTunes]
JotNot can scan your receipts by taking a picture of the receipt (can be done in the app itself), define the four corners of the receipt, the app will process the image of the receipt into a sharp looking version. I was skeptical about the image quality at first but was impressed by how the end result looked so sharp and “scanned-like”.
QuickPic
[$0.99 | Website | iTunes]
QuickPic basically lets you get an image out of your iPhone’s photo library or camera roll easily. You only need a web browser to do this. This is a time saving tool to get the scanned receipt using JotNot Scan out of your iPhone.
Here’s 4 steps to digitize your receipts with your iPhone:
Step 1
Take a picture of your receipt using JotNot Scan or import the image of the receipt you’ve previously taken before launching JotNot Scan:
Step 2
Define the 4 corners of the receipt by dragging the red circles to every corner:
Step 3
Once done, hit the “Process” button at the top right and you’ll see the result after the app processes the image. Save the image (your saved receipt will appear in the camera roll).
Step 4
Use QuickPic to get the receipt out of your camera roll easily, without this app you’ll need to email the receipt to yourself or use iPhoto to extract the image after docking your iPhone.
Launch QuickPic and choose your previously processed receipt using JotNot scan.
You’ll see your receipt in the window with a URL to download the image.
Enter the URL into your web browser and you’ll be able to view / download the receipt simply by dragging and dropping the image onto your desktop!
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The process looks like a long one with this seemingly long post, but I just want to be as detailed as possible by listing down all the steps clearly with the appropriate screenshots. Try it and you’ll find that it’s actually just two simple steps, snap your receipt with JotNot Scan and getting the image out of your iPhone with QuickPic.
I hope you find this tip useful, if you have any thoughts or suggestions please leave a comment.
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Great tips… getting much closer to a receipt management solution.
I would love to have something on the iPhone where you take a picture of the receipt that will a) attach to a Quicken entry and b) auto entry majority of information.
Receipt management takes up too much time.
- Apple’s email receipts are great ~ shame this isn’t an industry standard. I would expect this from the major credit card companies.
- Quicken: So so old… so out dated and generally poor Mac support. Their ‘new & improved’ Quicken app has been again postponed now due out in ’summer of 2009
- Ideal solution is to have everything in an application like Quicken. Click the entry and there is access to the receipt and warrantee management where needed.
-or