Let's face it, when it comes to having physical receipts and making sure you either keep them for your records or you use a solution to make them digital it needs to be quick, effective and hassle-free. In this Shoeboxed review we'll look into this mobile scanning app and if it's right for you and why over 1 million small business owners use it.

About Shoeboxed

Firstly, lets look at what the Shoeboxed app actually is and who it's for. Specifically designed with small business owners at its heart, Shoeboxed allows you to scan receipts quickly and efficiently, making sure you not only have a digital record of them, it also gives you the option of mailing in physical reciepts and letting them scan them and finally you have the option for forwarding on emailed invoices to them to file too. It's not just for receipts either, the app also allows you to use it for business cards.

Shoeboxed was founded in May 2007 and the Shoeboxed team have since had over a million small businesses use them for creating and managing digital receipts.

How Shoeboxed works

The mobile app - this allows you to take a photo of a receipt and it's digitally scanned via the app and the photo you take and logged in your account. They have both an iphone app and Android app.

Email invoices across - When you get an invoice emailed to you, you can simply forward the invoice to a Shoeboxed email address specific to you and it will get logged and a record kept

Send in paper receipts - Put all of your physical paper receipts into an envelope and send them to Shoeboxed directly and they will scan them for you.

Use the cloud - You can upload your invoices and receipts to the cloud, by dragging and dropping you can upload multiple receipts at the same time

Gmail plugin - This nifty plugin for your Gmail account will auto import receipts that it finds in emails, saving you time

The Shoeboxed Magic Envelopes

We had to tell you more about the Shoeboxed magic envelopes, because frankly they can be a life saver if you're the type of person or business that has hundreds of physical reciepts all stored up and the thought of scanning through them all fills you with dread.

The magic envelopes as you can see from the photo above, are an envelope which you fill with all of your physical receipts, business cards, invoices and so on and send directly to Shoeboxed, they then take care of all of the scanning. Not only saving you time but they also use a mixture of human verification and AI on the receipt data.

You'll also benefit from the reciepts being automatically sorted into one of 15 tax categories.

If you're wandering how many reciepts can fit in a magic envelope then their is no set answer, you'll find that they are 9″x 12″ in size and typically a customer can fit hundreds at a time into then. If you find you've filled one up, you can request another one at no extra cost.

How the magic envelopes work

It cannot be more simple to use this service from Shoeboxed, simply follow the steps below:

1. Request a Magic Envelope and then put all of your receipts into it (it's pre-paid for if sending within the United States)
2. Shoeboxed then scan each one and pull and verify all the data and upload it to your account
3. You'll get a notification that this when it happens so you can go and look in your account
4. Finally, depending on what you've opted for, either the physical receipts will be returned to you or they will shredded

Why we love Shoeboxed

We're yet to find someone who enjoys dealing with invoices and receipts (let us know if you're one of those people though) and so we love to find solutions that make life easier when it comes to these two important parts of your business.

We love that Shoeboxed makes your life much easier and what started as a receipt scanner has kept true to its core feature but expanded to cover all needs. Whereas other receipt apps fall back in that they may only offer a few methods of making a record of a receipt, Shoeboxed have all bases covered, from that quick photo you take of a receipt that you get in a shop to get that big pile of paper receipts sent directly to them to deal with. It doesn't matter if you only use one of these methods or a mixture, it's nice having the options there.

We also like that you can try Shoeboxed out for free, ultimately no matter how good an app or tool sounds, if you use it and it doesn't quite work for you, you don't like the user interface or find it doesn't suit your business, this free trial lets you cancel and not risk any financial loss.

Things we don't like

Although the business does allow for you to collect data from physical documents such as business cards and so forth, we feel the real power in this service is in the receipt and invoice area, there are other alternatives if you're seeking to capture data from business cards and ultimately this isn't an area we feel that is best served by this app.

It's also worth noting that when you submit documents, they will scan the document for text and the text analysis that is conducted (which is also verfied by humans) does count towards your monthly allowance, therefore you sometimes can end up using it up quite quickly. You can manually enter information if you want to avoid this if you're nearing your monthly limit though.

Shoeboxed Pricing

Of course with any tools or software pricing is important, and thats no different than with Shoeboxed pricing, they have three different plans that you can opt for depending on your needs, each vary on features but in general they all offer quite similar with the number of both physical and digital documents being scanned per year being the main differentiator.

All of the plans include unlimited file storage and unlimited users as well as access to the iOS app. It's worth noting if you want to link it up to your Quickbooks online then you'll need to have either the Professional or Business plans to do this, the entry level Startup plan doesn't include this.

We do like that they have a money-back guarantee on all of the annual plans if you close the account and request this within the first 30 days.

Shoeboxed Free Trial

We love software or tools that offer you the chance to experience it for free or in this case with a Shoeboxed free trial, it allows you to test it out and see if it works within your business and for you personally.

With the Shoeboxed free trial, if you select a monthly plan you'll not be charged for the first month and can cancel at anytime in that 30 days (note you will need to provide a credit or debit card on file) and for the annual plan you will be charged the full amount for the year, but if during that 30 days you cancel you can get a full refund for the entire year.

The Shoeboxed Web app

When you scan something, whether you've done yourself, sent it in, forwarded it via email or so on it will end up in your account. This can be viewed either from your mobile app or within the Shoeboxed website, we found this to be straight forward to navigate around and were impressed by how everything can be organized.

All of your documents can be seen in different areas such as 'Receipts' or 'Business Cards' and you means you can quickly jump to an area to look into them in more depth or to find a specific document you're looking for.

Within this section you'll also see which documents are marked as 'automatic' or 'manual' in regards to how to documents text has been processed and also allows you the option to select that you will do it yourself. Some users tend to upload receipts via their phone but then head to the web app to enter all of the information when manually doing it as they find it faster and more efficient.

You can also tag your reciepts so you can better organize them, examples of these tags could be 'entertainment' 'office equipment' 'stock' 'travel' and so on.

If you've been using Shoeboxed for your business cards, you'll be able to export all of the data from these straight into Google contacts.

Syncing Shoeboxed with accounting software

One of our favourite features, is the ability to sync Shoeboxed with either Quickbooks or Xero, this can drastically save you time and effort when it comes to your bookkeeping and accounting. You'll have to sync up your account but once done the process is easy and simple to use.

Many users will use the combination of this to create expense reports and ultimately use the main function of the app which is tracking receipts and as a way to track expenses.

Customer support

They have a phone number and live chat that you can use for customer support, as well as support documentation for questions which have been answered before.

In general the customer support that reviewers have talked about has been great whether this has been when joining as a customer to learning how to create reports to scanning a business card for the first time.

You can also book a demo with one of the Shoeboxed team so they can show you how it all works before you join and help answer any questions you may have.

What other Shoeboxed reviews say

Shoeboxed scores highly on other review sites, users on GetApp rate it 4.4/5 from over 200 reviews, G2 users rate it 4.4/5 from over 30 users and with millions of businesses using it we also can see why the Shoeboxed reviews are high and why customers tend to love using it.

Our Verdict

We're digital advocates and so we're all for making as much of our lives especially our business ones digital, now this isn't the case for everyone but even if you're not you'll have realized that business life in general now requires you to go digital in many cases.

Shoeboxed helps cover both bases, if you love the digital world then using the app to scan documents, having a Gmail plugin that auto pulls invoices into your account and using the Cloud to sync your important documents will be ideal for you.

If on the other hand you're more old school and prefer physical things but know you need to move digital, Shoeboxed's Magic Envelope service is the perfect solution, allowing you to send the paper receipts or physical copies of documents for them to scan for you, and you can also introduce scanning documents yourself when you're ready to.

Frequently Asked Questions about Shoeboxed.com

Here are some of the common questions regarding Shoeboxed, the service, app and more.

What happens to the physical files sent to Shoeboxed?

If you send physical files, whether this is invoices, receipts and so forth to Shoeboxed directly, you can opt for two outcomes after they have been scanned.

You can choose either to have them shredded by Shoeboxed or you can get them returned to you.

How secure is my data?

All of the digital documents and data that you give to Shoeboxed is protected by an SSL encription, similar to that used by banking. Physical documents are stored at their facility in Durham, NC, which have all entry points monitored 24/7. The Shoeboxed app also has all of the security you'd expect for an app that does this kind of data processing.

Can I sign up for a free trial without a credit card?

Unfortunately not, you'll need to provide either a credit card or debit card in order to try the service for the 30 days.

Can I create expense reports?

Yes, this is one of the features that they offer so you can easily create expense reports whether this is for you or one of your team members.

Is their an iOS and Android app?

Yes there is a Shoeboxed app for both iOS and Android, meaning no matter if you have an iPhone or Samsung or anything else that uses these two operating systems then you'll be able to download the app onto your phone and start creating digital receipts and scanning documents straight away.