A shoebox full of receipts: cleared in one hour

In short: You can clear a shoebox full of receipts in one hour if you work in four separate steps: discard (10 minutes), group by month (10 minutes), scan (30 minutes), check and export (10 minutes). The key is not to evaluate every receipt individually, but to throw out the obvious first and only then capture what is left.

Everyone has one: the box, drawer or envelope where every till slip, invoice and receipt has been landing for months. At some point the moment arrives when your accountant asks, the tax return is due, or the box simply overflows. Then the receipt backlog feels like a weekend project.

It is not. With a clear order of steps and no perfectionism, a typical pile of 150 to 300 receipts is done in one hour. This article gives you the plan, step by step, with timings.

Why the pile looks bigger than it is

The pile looks daunting because you evaluate each receipt as you look at it: Do I need this? What was it for? Which category? These individual decisions drain your energy, not the scanning. That is why the plan below only works if you keep the steps strictly separate: first only discard, then only sort, then only scan. Never everything at once.

A second reason: a box usually contains three kinds of paper that have nothing to do with each other. Receipts you need for tax or bookkeeping. Receipts that only matter for a warranty. And paper that never needed keeping in the first place (coffee, parking ticket, snack on the train). In practice, more than half tends to be in the third group. Which receipts to keep is covered in how long to keep receipts.

Step 1: Discard (10 minutes)

Empty the box onto the table and make three piles. Pick up each receipt, but decide in under two seconds:

• Bin: everyday shopping with no warranty, food and drink with no business connection, duplicates, ATM slips, anything already in the books.
• Keep, business or tax: materials, expenses, training, medical bills, donations, travel costs, anything that could be a deduction or a business cost.
• Keep, warranty: appliances, furniture, bike, tools. You only need these if something breaks.

If you are unsure, the receipt goes on the second pile. Being unsure is allowed. Spending ten minutes wondering whether a CHF 4.50 coffee was a client expense is not. If you are self-employed: anything you cannot assign to a business purpose within two seconds is unlikely to pass as a business expense anyway.

Step 2: Group by month (10 minutes)

Sort the "business or tax" pile roughly by month. Not by date, not by category, just by month. Twelve small piles are enough. Receipts with no readable date get their own pile.

This has two benefits. First, you will not keep jumping between January and October while scanning, which makes the final check easier. Second, you immediately see if a month is suspiciously empty. That usually means receipts are missing that you can still find by email or in the retailer's online account. What to do when a receipt is missing is covered in lost a receipt?.

The warranty receipts go into a single envelope marked with the year. They get scanned too, but do not need sorting by month.

Step 3: Catch up on receipts by scanning (30 minutes)

Now you scan, month by month, without interruption. With a scanner app on your phone, one receipt takes around 10 to 15 seconds: place, photograph, next. For 150 receipts that is about 30 minutes. What matters is the flow, not the speed per receipt:

1. Bright surface, daylight or a ceiling light, no shadow from your own head.
2. Lay the receipt flat, smooth out crumpled ones briefly.
3. Photograph, glance at the result, next receipt.
4. Fill in nothing, categorise nothing. That comes in step 4.

With Belego it works like this: the app crops each receipt, straightens it and saves it as a PDF. Amount, date, merchant and category are read automatically. Anything that cannot be read with confidence stays blank so you can fill it in deliberately later. How to avoid the most common photo mistakes is explained in the tips for photographing receipts.

Faded receipts are the biggest problem when catching up. Anything still faintly visible you photograph in angled light and enter the amount and merchant by hand. Further rescue attempts are described in faded receipt?. Anything that is no longer readable at all you document with a self-made note or leave out.

Step 4: Check and export (10 minutes)

Finally, go through the list once and fill in what stayed blank. Typically that is receipts with no date, crumpled slips or handwritten receipts. Spot-check whether the extracted amounts are right, especially on receipts with tips or several currencies.

Then assign categories. You only need a handful, such as materials, expenses, training, health, private. Which categories are actually useful is covered in receipt categories that make sense. At the end you export the whole period: in Belego you choose a year or month and get a ZIP file with all PDFs, named by date, merchant and amount, plus a CSV list. That file goes to your accountant or into your tax folder. The ZIP is also your backup.

What to do with the paper afterwards

For private individuals: warranty receipts go into the annual envelope, the rest can go as soon as the scan is readable. For the self-employed in Switzerland, the 10-year retention rule under Art. 958f OR applies. Digital receipts are permitted if they remain unalterable and readable; if you want to be safe, keep the originals in one box per year as well. The details are in the article on retention rules in Switzerland.

And so the box is not full again in six months: the one-hour effort exists because 150 receipts were allowed to pile up. If you invest five minutes a week, you will never have the pile again. How to do that is shown in the 5-minute receipt routine.

Frequently asked questions

How do I capture old receipts when the date is no longer readable?

First check whether the purchase appears on your bank statement or credit card bill. That gives you the date and amount. Enter both by hand in the scanner app and add a note such as "date per bank statement". If that is not possible either, assign the receipt to the most likely month and note the uncertainty. For bookkeeping, a plausible date with a note is better than a missing receipt.

Is it worth scanning a backlog that spans several years?

Yes, but one year at a time and not all in one evening. Start with the most recent year, because it is the most urgent for tax and bookkeeping. Only capture older years if they are still relevant for tax or if warranties are still running. Receipts older than ten years can be discarded in Switzerland even by businesses.

Do I have to categorise every receipt individually while clearing the backlog?

No. Categorise only after everything is scanned, and limit yourself to five to eight categories. Categorising while scanning doubles the time and breaks your rhythm. Many apps suggest a category during extraction anyway. For a tax return it is enough to separate deductible receipts from private ones; the finer assignment is done later by your accountant or by you when filling in the forms.

What about receipts that arrived by email?

Search your inbox for "invoice", "receipt", "order" and "Rechnung" for the period in question and save the attachments as PDFs. File those PDFs together with the scanned paper receipts so you end up with a single place to look. Online receipts are often exactly the ones that turn out to be missing from the box.