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The five minute receipt habit that saves your January
Nobody enjoys this part. The good news is that doing it badly every week beats doing it properly once a year by a wide margin.
Why the annual pile fails
A year of receipts in a drawer is not a filing problem; it is a memory problem. In January, you can tell what a payment was for about half the time. The other half gets left out, which means you pay tax on money you actually spent on the business.
On a typical freelance year, we see between $1,200 and $3,000 of costs go unclaimed simply because nobody could remember what a payment was. At the basic rate, that is real money, and it happens every year.
“Every receipt you photograph in the week it happened is worth more than three you find in January.”
The five-minute version
Pick a time that already exists in your week. Friday afternoon before you shut the laptop works for most people. Open your email, search the last seven days for anything that looks like a receipt, and forward it to one address. Then photograph whatever is in your wallet and bin the paper.
What actually needs keeping
You need evidence of what was bought, not just that money left your account. A card statement shows an amount and a merchant, which is not enough on its own if anyone ever asks.
Anything over $50, always
Anything where the merchant name does not explain the purchase
All travel, since it is the most queried category
Every asset purchase, however small it looked at the time
A readable photo counts. It does not need to be flat, scanned, or straight.
Card, cash and subscriptions,
Cash is the one that disappears. If you pay cash, photograph the receipt before it goes in a pocket, because there is no bank line to jog your memory later.
Subscriptions are the opposite problem. They are all in your bank feed, so they get coded, but half of them are personal, and half are business, and only you know which. Once a year, open the list and tell us which is which. It takes ten minutes, and it usually finds something you forgot you were paying for.
When you fall behind
Everyone does at some point. A busy month goes by, and the habit stops. It is not a crisis, and it is not worth a guilty email. Tell your bookkeeper where you are up to, and we will chase the specific ones that matter rather than asking for everything.
The only version that goes badly is silence until January.
