As we get towards the holiday season the one thing that's on everyone's mind is...TAX. Okay not really, but we will be getting to that point as we cross into the new year which is coming up quick.
Tax time was always a headache for me, tracking business expenses for write offs, organizing receipts, digitizing them so I don't have to hold on to that overflowing box under my desk. I wanted to solve this problem once and for all.
Shortcuts are an underutilized tool for business owners. You can easily write very useful automation scripts on your phone to handle monotomous tasks. Here's how I handled my expense tracking.
I created 2 different shortcuts one for personal expenses and one for business expenses. I am planning on tracking both and there are a few intricacies which makes it easier to just have two different shortcuts. I'll explain that in more detail a little later.
Lets briefly discuss what this Shortcut does.
1. Prompts you to choose an expense category
2. Prompts you to enter expense amount
3. Adds info to a spreadsheet 4. Prompts you to take a picture of the receipt
5. Adds the picture to a specific folder.
Setup
To use this shortcut you need to setup a spreadsheet in Numbers. I saved this in my iCloud Drive so expenses tracked on my phone are automatically updated on the same file that I can pull up on my laptop. Make sure to remember the title of the file and the title of the table, as the shortcut will need that information to add the line to the file.
Next you will want to setup a new album in your photos app, call it Personal Expenses.
That is all the setup that is needed. Now you are off to build your shortcut.
Here's how it all works:
First you are prompted to choose from a list of categories to categorize the expense. You can add whatever you want to this list. I think this is a pretty good start for me the only thing I may add is a miscellaneous category in case what I'm buying is not on the list.
Next you ask for input from the user asking them to enter how much the expense is.
Once you have all the data from the above 2 questions you can add this along with the current date to the spreadsheet we setup earlier.
Lastly it prompts you to take a picture of the receipt and it saves the file in the Personal Expenses album in photos.
In Action
Here's a little demo of the Shortcut in action.
Feel free to download this shortcut here and add your own tweaks. Let me know down in the comments what you have changed to fit your needs.