How to organise receipts and invoices without building a spreadsheet

Everyone who has ever done their own accounts has at some point built the spreadsheet. Date, supplier, amount, category, link to the file. It is always going to be so useful.

It lasts about six weeks. Then there is a gap in March, and once there is a gap you stop trusting it, and once you stop trusting it you stop filling it in.

The spreadsheet is the wrong artefact

The reason it fails is that it is a second copy of information that already exists. The receipt already says the supplier, the date and the amount. Typing those into a grid adds no facts, it only makes them sortable.

Which would be fine if it were free. It is not. It is a minute per receipt, at a moment when you have just spent money and are thinking about something else.

Your accountant, meanwhile, mostly wants the receipts. Not your spreadsheet.

What actually has to be true

Three things, and only three:

1. The receipt exists somewhere you can get at it.
2. You can find a specific one later, usually by supplier or by roughly when.
3. You can hand over everything for a period without assembling it by hand.

Notice that none of those require categorising anything at the moment of purchase.

A version that survives

Photograph the receipt when you get it, or forward the email confirmation, and then do nothing else.

The photograph is the hard part and it is already a habit most people have. What usually goes wrong is the nothing else: the photo lands in your camera roll between pictures of your dog, and finding it in October means scrolling through August.

So the receipt needs to leave the camera roll and land somewhere that reads it. In Stash, a photographed receipt gets the text pulled out of it and a name taken from what is on it, so it stops being IMG_6301 and becomes something with the shop in it. It lands in whichever stash you keep for money, because that is what it recognises the thing as.

Email receipts are easier still. Forward them to the address in Settings and they arrive, get read, and get filed, with the subject line usually making a good name on its own.

Finding one later

This is where the spreadsheet was supposed to earn its keep, and where search quietly does better.

If the text of the receipt has been read, you can search for the supplier and get every receipt from them, in any month, without having categorised anything. You can also just ask: which train tickets did I buy in March. Ask reads your library and answers, showing the things it used underneath so you can check the answer rather than trust it.

That last part matters for anything involving money. An answer you cannot check is not useful, and it is worse than useless if you are filing a return on the strength of it.

Handing it over

At the end of a period you want all of it, not a selection. Export everything from Settings and you get the files out under the names they were given, which is the difference between a folder somebody else can use and a folder of IMG numbers.

What this does not do

It does not add up your expenses. It does not produce a total, categorise things for tax, or tell you what is deductible.

If you need those, you need accounting software, and the honest answer is that this sits before it rather than replacing it. What it fixes is the part where the receipts are scattered across a camera roll, three email accounts and a shoebox, which is usually the actual bottleneck rather than the arithmetic.

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