How To Manage Your Receipts

I like to travel. A lot. I already wrote about some of my travel experiences in 44 tips for traveling long distance. But one of the things I didn’t mention in that post, mainly because I didn’t know much about it at that time, was about the practical side of the… expenses. Not the money itself, but the receipts. How do you do your receipt management? How do you know, once you’re back home, how much did you spent and where?

Entering Shoeboxed

One advantage of having a fairly popular blog is that you get a lot of product review requests. I know that I get at least one per week. 99% of them are either out of my blog target, either under my personal radar (meaning I’m not interested in them). But every once in a while I get a request to test a product that really blows my mind. And I mean it.

This time I’m going to talk about shoeboxed, a service which allows you to externalize your receipt management. In short, this service takes a picture of your receipt and gives you back a text representation of it. In other words, it does the dirty work for you, transcribing your unordered piles of paper into meaningful reports.

Now, every time I get back from my trips, apart from presents and other stuff I’m throwing into my backpack, I also bring home a lot of paper. Namely, receipts. A lot of receipts. Each trips has its own pile of receipts, waiting to be categorized, transcribed and somehow processed into my own personal expenses tracking system. Yes, I do have an expenses tracking system, in case you’re wondering.

How Does It Works?

When I first heard about Shoeboxed I was a little reluctant. The same type of reluctance you get when you hire an accountant for the first time. You know, “these are my personal receipt, should I give them to you?”. Anyway, I took the plunge and started a test drive with Shoeboxed.

Apart from being a web based service, Shoeboxed has also an iPhone app. And since I’m a little bit of an iPhone nerd myself, I kinda dug that. So, the easiest way to start externalizing your receipt management is to take pictures of them and send them to the Shoeboxed human-powered transcribing services using their iPhone app. You can take the picture from within the Shoeboxed app or you can chose one already taken from your Photos albums. Once the image was sent, it will appear in the app as “Pending”. And I will get an email stating that my receipt was received and that it will be soon processed.

After the receipt image is processed, you get a chance to generate a report from within the same iPhone app and send that report to you (or to someone else) by email.

That’s all. Really.

A Real Life Example

Let’s see now a real life example. I randomly picked a receipt from my trip to Japan, took a picture of it using the app and send it over. In less than 30 seconds I got a confirmation email:

I also took a picture of another piece of paper, but this time it wasn’t a receipt, just a document in Japanese I somehow kept in my papers. I know, I’m picky. But I really wanted to know if at the other end there was really a “human powered transcribing service”. I got a confirmation email for this piece of paper too. So they received it ok.

The next day, another email stated that my receipt was processed. I opened the app, and voila:

In about half an hour I also got another email in which they said my second “receipt” wasn’t processed. Reason: unknown document. And the change was also reflected in the iPhone app:

So the guys really looked at it. Nice

I generated my report using the only receipt I had in the system and it all went incredibly smooth:

That’s all folks. Really.

Business Cards Are Nice Too

Now, what do you do if you have some human powered work force, some OCR software to do the dirty job for you and a lot of audience (Shoeboxed is pretty popular, you know)? You expand. So, the next logical step was to give you a complimentary service, in the form of a business card transcribing service. Now that’s something really neat, right?

Make a picture of a business card, send it over and in a business day you’ll find your business card data processed and ready to be imported into a few popular contact management software formats. I don’t use business cards anymore, but I know a lot of people are still using them, so I guess this lateral spinning of the Shoeboxed was absolutely brilliant.

It All Starts With A Free Trial

Now, all is good and shiny. But please don’t take my word for it. Go try it out for yourself. You know that I only endorse products I use and believe in, but even that level of commitment shouldn’t be a reason for you to walk into my shoes. Do your own free trial there’s absolutely no cost. Use it for 30 days and if, at the end of the trial period you don’t like it, lose it.

Because there’s a lot more behind this service. You can even have the report sent to you by snail mail using their envelopes or even a free quarterly backup. There is a full list of prices but before checking them out, let me tell you that you can even get on a DIY plan, which is free. The other plans are starting for as low as 9.95/month. Oh, and they also have a special offer to save 10$ on any annual subscription for their Mail-In plan, check it out here.

Again, do your own math and see what plan is good for you.

Conclusion

Every time a specific activity gets too stressful to be done by yourself, somebody else will think of a way to externalize it. They’ll find a way to take that burden off of your shoulders. For a price, fo course. Think at accounting. In itself, it’s a very private activity, it’s about your own money, for God sake! And yet, accounting, as an externalization service for keeping track of your revenues and expenses, became the de facto approach.

I really think services like Shoeboxed will soon become the de facto standard for receipt management. It just makes sense.

And you don’t have to take my word for it. Just go ahead and try it out for yourself. It’s free in the first 30 days.

Brand Your Captcha – Introducing AdCaptcher

Every once in a while I stumble upon some interesting online project. Being for so long in this market as an entrepreneur certainly makes it easier. One of the most interesting projects I saw in the last few months is called AdCaptcher. And, if you’re a regular commenter on this blog you may already used it.

Brand Your Captcha?

If you tried to post a comment on my form you saw that captcha you had to fill in before the comment gets approved. So far, nothing spectacular, a lot of blogs are using captcha on the comment forms to avoid spam. What’s different here is that if I use AdCaptcher, I can control my own captcha text. Exactly. The words used by me were: ’a better life’, and I’m sure you wondered how can a simple captcha serve a piece of text so in sync with the blog theme. Well, it wasn’t by hazard, that I can tell you. A bit confused? Ok, let’s take it step by step.

Here’s how AdCaptcher works in just a few simple sentences.

If you have a blog, you go register at AdCaptcher (this is an invite link, it will expire after 200 logins, so you’d better hurry). Once you have an account, you can submit your site. After you submit your site, you can add an image. That image would be the one used for captcha. The text in that image would be the text your users have to fill in order to be validated. Don’t worry, the admin interface is pretty simple.

After you set up your blog and you add your image, you can start a campaign. Your freshly created captcha will start to be displayed on other blogs and that would be what AdCaptcher call a campaign. You can buy more impressions or just use a standard exchange rate. There’s more to be explained about campaigns, but to be honest, this is not the best place for that, you’d better go there and see for yourself. Everything is neatly put into packages and suitable sized for your blog traffic (packages are based on a number of impressions).

After you set up your blog, your image and your campaign, you gotta download a little wordpress plugin to make it all work. There is a link at the AdCaptcher site for it. This plugin will make the connection between your setup at the AdCaptcher servers and your comment form in your blog. Once you activate the plugin, ta-daaa: you have a tiny little captcha just above the comment text area.

Advantages

First of all, it’s the spam control. I learned a little bit about the technology used by AdCaptcher and I can tell you it’s pretty solid. I won’t go into detail because, usually, you don’t make spam fighting technologies public. There’s a pretty solid reason for that: a spammer may read and learn.

Second, you get to brand your captcha with your own text, helping your users having a better experience. I remember that at least 2 of my commenters were positively impressed by the words I choose for my captcha and believe me, I consider this to be a pretty positive outcome of this little piece of technology.

Third, you promote your blog by having your captchas delivered on other blogs and that’s a pretty interesting advantage. If you run a blog you know how difficult is to attract new readers. And having your own captcha inserted in the hottest point of a blog, the commenter form, could be an incentive for them to click and see what’s all about.

AdCaptcher is still in private beta but it’s working. I used for a few weeks on my blog and it didn’t made any major blunders. Of course, there’s a lot of work to be done, but I think it’s a pretty interesting concept. If only because nobody thought so far to build such a complex application just in order to brand a captcha.

As for my affiliation with AdCaptcher, there isn’t any. I’m not affiliated with them in any ways, I just think this is a pretty cool idea.

So, if you want to try it for yourself, just click on this link to get an invite. Remember, it will expire after 200 uses, so you’d better be fast.

Rescue me. Or just my time :-)

Busy as I managed to be lately, I still stumbled upon a little thingie that caught my attention, used several of my neurons, and triggered the big decision to actually write a small note about it in my almost desert blog. Well, it won’t be desert for long, my time-hungry big project is decently approaching an end so I should be really back on track by the end of this month.

Now, about the little thingie: it’s a time tracking application, called RescueTime, that promises to be very heplful. You can find more info on their website, rescuetime.com, if you’re impatient, but if not, here are some random pieces of info. It’s a dual OS program (and THAT I really like already about it), meaning it can run on Windows and Mac, that collects information about how you spend your time at the computer. It’s web based, meaning you will send your data to a webserver somewhere, but with all the buzz of the web-based GTD solution lately, I think this is already trivial and doesn’t rise any privacy questions. So far. Also, the piece of software tracks the time you spend on each website, not only on your browser of choice, which can be also very helpful. You will not have 95% Firefox and 5% Zend Studio. But 5% php.net, 23% 43folders.com, and 21% wikipedia.org. Joking, of course. Who will spend so much time on Wikipedia and so little on 43folders?

Being wab-based, this little thingie promises to deliver a vey interesting piece of mashable information. Imagine what you can do with this data, linked to your BackPack account, or with your Actionatr online sibling of your Actiontastic GTD software. Promising.

Digital Tools I Use

I want to jot down some stuff about the tools I use to get things done. This would be very sketchy at the beginning, and I’ll try to add more as I go along…

As I already said, I was a Linux guy for about 10 years and I just turned to Mac several months ago. While in Linux there is no such thing such as productivity, but only challenges, in the real world you find yourself in situations where you can actually must to deliver in a specific context. The beauty of Linux is that you can accomplish virtually anything you want with a little bit of tweaking and a little bit of programming and a little bit of neglecting your family . It’s the ideal framework for new trends and for research. And also, incredibly stable.

But Mac, that’s another story. It’s a thing you can actually use to do things, do them with elegance, and also have a life. It’s not suitable for a server, as far as I know. I wouldn’t host on a Mac platform unless I would be forced to. But I would use it every day to write my stuff, get organized and code. Here’s a list of what I use:

Basic Sketching of Ideas

OmniOutliner from OmniGroup. Easy to use. Intuitive. Powerfull. Let me concentrate on the flow of the thoughts. Never used an outliner before, only if I don’t count the extensive use of dashes in vi and other terminal-based editor in Linux, like joe or pico. OmniOutliner come out first after trying several of its competitors.

elaborate brainstorming:

MindManager from MindJet. I was one of the lucky guys that got a free license in a blogger related program and now I’m in love with it. I use MindManager to actually visually draw my thoughts and see how they interact with one eachother. Usually I end up by tossing a project or an idea that sounded so reasonable and eye-catching at the beginning, but once analysed into a mind map proved to be unusable. Once MindManager-ed, meaning once an idea has proven to be viable by passing the mind map exam, it can go further and turn into a project.

Project Planning

OmniPlan from OmniGroup. This tool is new, but is awesome. I already used it for several weeks now and it turned out to be one of the easiest way to actually put my real projects together. Besides the normal GANTT stuff that we all use, there are some gems like: Resource and Calendar view that make my life a lot easier. My projects are usually about web applications and involves a lot of human resources. Using OmniPlan gave me at some point a very strange but refreshing feeling that I can actually know the workload of each of my programmers.

GTD Software

ThinkingRock from an Australian company called Avente Pty. Ltd. It’s a Java implementation, that passed the 1.0 version (at this time they are at 1.2.3 version) and it follows very closely the GTD methodology of David Allen. I tried a lot of applications (including kinkless GTD since I am such a passionate fan of OmniOutliner) but none let me with a clearer mind that ThinkingRock.

Email Reading and Management

Mail.app from Mac Os X. I have only three main folders: Answer ASAP, Waiting For and Reference. The only one that it actually grows is Reference, where I allow myself to have trees of topics and hold related messages there. The Answer ASAP is where I route all the messages from my Inbox that aren’t answered right now and also are not deleted. Once answered, the messages are moved to Reference, or deleted. If one of the message implies another person, I BCC myself, and then move the received message into the Waiting For mailbox.

Web Browsing

Firefox and, from time to time, Safari. I might be biased here since I used Mozilla/Firefox all my life but I feel like Safari still has some work to do at CSS validating and at RSS stuff. But the odds are raising in favor of Safari lately. Also, most of the time, Safari looked a little faster than Firefox. Also, besides several glitches, Safari has a more orthodox JavaScript engine. So far..O

Office

NeoOffice, a port to Mac of OpenOffice, with significantly low rates of crashing… Never had an import problem, but that should be obvious, since NeoOffice is based on OpenOffice. I tend not to use spreadsheets extensively (I found out that I can outline a minimal budget in OmniOutliner Pro if I really need that…) and also read text documents only when I have to.

Coding

Zend Studio 5.0 form Zend. I love the code folding feature, as I have rather large projects and seeing all the functions or DocBlocks at a glance make my life easier. The integration with PHPDocumentator is also a big plus, not to mention the very good code completion. And, surprisingly enough, is not so resource hungry as I thought at the begining.

Every once in a while I surprise myself fiddling into a terminal with some bash commands, but this is just a temporary trauma from my Linux days. I guess.

This setup allows me to have pretty nice level of productivity while letting me enough time to enjoy other, non-work related, activites.

[tags]MAC OS X, productivity, MindManager, Zend, NeoOffice, OmniPlan, OmniOutliner, ThinkingRock[/tags]