I use JotNot Pro on my iPhone to track receipts. As soon as I get a receipt - say at a restaurant - I immediately snap a photo of it. JotNot takes a black and white contrast-enhancing picture of the cropped receipt that's as good as what comes out of a scanner and adds that image to my ongoing collection of receipts for that business trip.
At the end of my trip JotNot allows me to email a PDF of the collected receipts (or upload it to my DropBox).
I never lose receipts. I never have to deal with receipts that have rapidly faded because a little restaurant grease got on them (looking at you, Jimmy Johns). I never have to worry about finding a scanner and how to place each receipt on the scanner bed.
When I show co-travelers my process, they normally immediately download JotNot or find some alternative on Android since JotNot is iPhone only afaik.
I would be really sad if I had to go back to holding on to paper receipts and scanning them in via some other method.
Maybe I'll give the "taking photo" thing another try. I always end up finding it too fiddly and go back to sticking the receipt in my wallet but it's probably worth reconsidering.
The way I track expenses is using Scannable (it's an Evernote app). The main point there is to capture the receipt - and it's really, really good at that one thing: capturing.
Then I throw away the receipts and fill in the expense report later in whatever system I'm told to use.
I can't imagine an easier way to digitize a receipt, short of a receipt that's emailed to you from the get-go.
>I can't imagine an easier way to digitize a receipt
For me, it ends up being sticking them in a wallet/envelope and then scanning then in bulk when I get back. If I had a phone app that integrated with a back-end expenses system, I could probably be persuaded to use it because it would largely eliminate the manual process of creating an expense report. However, as it is, something like Expensify trades a one-time batch operation for a bunch more fiddling at the point of spending.
Are you using Expensify's "SmartScanning"? It's worth the $0.20 per receipt image. It basically send the receipt to a person, who then extracts the info from the receipt and enters into expensify FOR YOU....
Well, then I would have to transfer everything from expensify into the back-end system that we use to actually turn those receipts into numbers in my bank account :-)
Camera interfaces are getting better all the time.
For my banking app, you can take a picture of a check to deposit it. Instead of needing to frame, focus and snap the picture (which is how it used to work a few updates ago), a frame appears on the phone screen - you merely line up the check inside the frame, and when it's lined up sufficiently the shutter clicks and takes the picture for you. It's quite nice actually.
How else would you take a physical receipt and turn it digital? Enter the info manually? I'd think that taking a picture is actually the fastest and lowest friction option.
I do it every time I deposit a physical check into my bank account with my BofA app it's pretty awesome, it even recognizes the deposit amount.
Expensify goes a step further and gets a person to look at your receipt photo and then enters/confirms the information and enters it as a text into your expense report. It turns pictures into expense report rows.
Expensify: Take a picture of your receipt. It gets sent to someone in India/Phillipines/etc. Who then look at the total, the name of the plae and ENTER ALL THAT INFORMATION FOR YOU.
When you get back to your office - it's available in an excel sheet.
The right answer is to get those receipts into a digital format some other way, not with the camera.
I would have deleted this app after I tried wasting 30 seconds taking a nice little picture of a $20 receipt the first time.