Smartlife

Two years ago, we took a look at Shoeboxed.com. In short, you’re able to outsource your receipt management to this company — it scans, categorizes, and organizes your receipts for your online management. The receipts are then be securely shredded and discarded.

From your end, all you had to do was stuff all of your business receipts (and personal receipts, for that matter) into a prepaid envelope and Shoeboxed.com would take care of the rest. In addition to paper receipts, you can also send receipts via…

Computers can be like Sumo wrestlers: the more powerful they get, the slower they can become and the less you want to root around their crevices to try to fix the problem. That’s because every useful computer in the world not currently controlling nuclear warheads is online, which means the last person to know what it’s doing is the actual user. And if you’re in an office, meaning other idiots have had access to it, it’s probably suffering from more damaging parasites than the crew in Alien.

Your system shouldn’t…

The real secret to a smart life isn’t solving special relativity or the mysteries of creation: it’s eliminating those almost invisible hassles you never imagine but always experience, usually when you’re on the last minute of an important deadline. Jammed photocopiers, missing the train, the little widget-thing blinking LEDs instead of working — basically everything that doesn’t happen to James Bond. Those are what delay your day.

The most common problem of all is moving a large file. You’ve been up all night, all week, even all month preparing the…

Finding a way to organize all the receipts, business cards, and other papers you collect can be difficult. Many people manage their finances and address books on their computers, along with other files, practically guaranteeing that someone is going to need to transcribe each little slip of paper or scan it in individually. Neither approach is particularly appealing, especially considering how few scanners have the optical character recognition software to automatically translate printed documents into something a computer can translate. The NeatDesk, from The Neat Company, offers…

Receipts are a necessary evil: you have to have them to track expenses, calculate tax deductions, and manage your finances. Despite the fact that we need organized receipts, however, most of us resort to the shoe-box method: throw all the receipts in one box and toss it in the closet. It’s not that we don’t know that we need receipts — it’s just that it can take a lot of time to sort and record all those slips of paper. There is a way to get it done without going crazy, though: outsource it. One website, in particular, makes it easy to let someone else handle sorting your receipts. Shoeboxed will scan and categorize every receipt you can send them with no worries.