Infographic: How to organize your receipts for tax time

Posted by Matthew Murphy on December 30, 2011

Whether you’re a small business owner or an employee itemizing deductions, the end of the year means organizing your receipts. It’s rarely fast (or fun), but an intelligible collection of receipts makes end-of-year planning infinitely easier. Follow this simple guide to make order out of chaos and get your receipts ready for tax time.

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Procrastinators Unite!

Posted by Mary Chan on December 22, 2011

10, 9, 8, 7…. Yes, this is the count down and we have fewer than 3 days left for holiday shopping.  According to a recent survey conducted by the National Retail Federation, only 7.6% of people completed their holiday shopping and more shocking is that nearly 37 million people hadn’t even started their shopping by the beginning of December. Why are millions procrastinating?  The common answer I hear is folks are bargain shoppers, waiting for the deeper discounts, as it gets closer to Christmas Day.  I personally would like to procrastinate until the day after for even better deals (but a little hard to convince my little ones)! I, not [...]

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Note to Self: Receipt Notes Go a Long Way

Posted by Mary Chan on December 15, 2011

We recently rolled out some great new features, including the ability to edit receipts, manually add receipts, select a currency, and add a note to your receipt.  While all are equally amazing and useful, I find that sometimes it’s the little things that go a long way. Adding a note to your receipt may not seem like a big feature, but being a forgetful person (and no, it’s not age related, or at least I won’t admit that it is), this little note feature is extremely useful for both professional and personal uses. On the professional front, one of the common reimbursable expenses is meals and entertainment.  Your company policy [...]

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Holiday Spending? More Like Holiday Stressing

Posted by Cindy McAdam on December 13, 2011

A pair of CBS News polls conducted in November present an interesting look at Americans and their holiday spending.  On the one hand, American are planning to do less holiday spending than last year.  But on the other hand, they are feeling a lot more stressed out by holiday spending this year.  How can we be spending less but feeling more stressed out? As people track expenses more closely in this economy, it seems like they are looking for ways to shop smarter at the holidays.  But this can often conflict with a desire to spend on all those perfect presents we have picked out for the people who are [...]

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Exporting Expenses for Easy Credit Card Reconciliation

Posted by Mary Chan on December 8, 2011

This is a momentous day for me — I now have a full month of credit card receipts stored in my Lemon app.  So, I’ve used Lemon for my first monthly credit card reconciliation with the help of Lemon’s new export feature.  It’s available in the Reports section of both the web and mobile versions of Lemon. I’m a heavy credit card user (and I’ve got several of them).  So, if I did it at all, the reconciliation process used to take forever to match each receipt with a purchase, but now it takes me only minutes. This is when a little Lemon app organization comes in handy.  I slap [...]

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Better Reporting with Expense Categories

Posted by Cindy McAdam on December 6, 2011

If you access your receipt data using the web version of Lemon, you may have noticed that there are now expense categories attached to you purchases.  If you only use the mobile version, don’t worry, these will soon be coming in a version of the app to be released in the near future.  But if you want to check it out now, head on over to our website. Categories are a description of the merchant that Lemon automatically adds to your purchase.  These categories are drawn from a wide range of sources, and in many cases, the category reflects how the merchant has identified itself.  If you want to change [...]

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Spending Less

Posted by Cindy McAdam on December 1, 2011

Black Friday has come and gone.  But unlike Mary, I’m decidedly not a shopper.  So while she was braving the crowds on Friday morning, I was busy reading the newspaper. And that’s when I ran across the full-page ad in the New York Times that Patagonia ran for their Common Threads Initiative.   Patagonia is the well-known, California-based purveyor of outdoor clothing.  As a successful retailer, it’s a bold move to ask their customers to buy less, particularly on what is touted as the biggest shopping day of the year. But the initiative is part of Patagonia’s larger commitment to the environment.  The initiative was launched a few months ago with [...]

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