Dreading Taxes? Let Shoeboxed Do Some Of The Legwork

With tax season rapidly approaching, the prospect of digging through receipts for business expenses and tax deductions is looming large. Shoeboxed, a site that helps manage your purchases by scanning your receipts and posting them to the web, is looking to make the process a little easier.

We last covered the site back in November 2007, when it experimented with a social shopping feature that the company abandoned after about a week. Now it’s concentrating on helping users mange their receipts online. To get started, users mail in their receipts which Shoeboxed then scans and enters into its web-based software (the company can handle multiple receipts at once, with an estimated wait time of 2-3 days to get a boxful online). The site also recently began accepting business cards. The service runs around $10/month, with more expensive plans for heavy users (over 50 receipts a month).

Once the receipts are online, users can easily assign them into different catagories (for example, labeling which ones are company expenditures). Mint does something similar, but it only lists your transactions based on their location, and you can’t see an itemized list of what you’ve purchased. Of course, Shoeboxed is only useful if you’re diligent about sending in your receipts – if you’re the kind of person who loses them frequently, it won’t do you much good.

The company has forged a deal with TaxACT, a popular online tax filing company that will be promoting Shoeboxed as an effective way to minimize sifting through paperwork. It also just announced a partnership with ScanDigital, a company that converts media like photos slides to digital formats (the two companies will cross-promote eachothers’ services).