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I'm absolutely paranoid about tossing any receipts anymore.

Here's why.

A few years ago it was end of year and we were looking to clean up a little bit. At that point, we had reconciled all of our bank statements. The receipts had served that purpose, so we thought, why not get rid of them? We didn't want to just throw them away: too much personal information. So I took them outside and burned them.

Well, it wasn't two days later that I looked at my flexible spending account balance and realized that I could claim a lot of over-the-counter medications.

If I had the receipts. Which were now a pile of ash.

I told myself I would never discard anything like that again, because it's all but a guarantee that I'll need it as soon as I can't access it anymore.

But, I haven't found a good solution for dealing with all of those receipts. They're just in a big basket right now.

If you have something that's worked for you, what? Envelopes? Some kind of receipt scanner? A plain old scanner?

flag	asked Oct 5 at 4:20 mbhunter♦♦ 2,594●1●2●11

Jackie · Answer 1 · 2009-10-22 01:07:55Z UTC

I keep the originals unless they are on thermal paper. (Since it gets so hot here, I don't trust thermal paper to stick around -- I've ended up with little blank pieces of paper more than once.) But, I sure don't keep all of my receipts. Instead, I only keep the ones that could possibly have any tax implications. Of course that means boning up ahead of time on what kinds of things could possibly be deductible, but I feel pretty confident that I'm not missing much of them. Then once taxes are done I shred any that didn't end up being used for tax purposes, and save the ones that did with the paper version of my tax return.

As a side note, sometimes pharmacies will be happy to print off the year's worth of flexible spending-eligible purchases for you.

Canadian Finance · Answer 2 · 2009-10-08 22:38:02Z UTC

If you don't absolutely need the original copy, scanning your receipts can be a great way to keep them organized on your computer. The ScanSnap S300 is a great document scanner.

If you must keep your originals, it's hard to beat a filing cabinet with folders setup in whichever way you believe to be most useful. For example, the folders could be labeled by year or by spending category.

Revanche · Answer 3 · 2009-10-21 03:10:51Z UTC

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Since I've gone digital, just a plain scanner (Epson) does the trick to save anything of possible value. It might not be a special receipt scanner but it works just fine and gets a lot more done than a specialty machine.

answered Oct 21 at 3:10

Revanche
211●1

How to deal with receipts without discarding any of them?

3 Answers