If your receipts are jammed in your wallet, all over your car, at the bottom of your purse or just laying around it’s time to set a place for receipts.

First, remember you can refuse a receipt for the items you don’t need to document because really, does anyone need to prove they bought a smoothie 3 weeks ago?

Obviously if you’re setting up an alibi, keep the receipt.

If you’re holding onto a receipt for an item you might need to return, it is helpful to note on the receipt what you bought and put them in a dedicated folder.

If you have business receipts, I highly recommend Shoeboxed which gives you envelopes to send in your receipts, scans and categorizes them for you and then will mail them back or recycle them for you. If you sign up for an account I may get a slight discount on my monthly subscription.

I’ve used Shoeboxed for years and it saves me so much time not manually entering receipts and I love setting up rules so every receipt from a particular store is tagged the same way.

If you’re looking for a single simple step today: gather all the receipts you can find and gather them in one place.