Accounting and I go together like mustard and cashmere. I absolutely can’t stand it. Over the past few years I’ve started using an Accountant for my taxes and that has made my life much easier… but until recently, I haven’t really needed to keep receipts for an extended period of time because I had an expense account through work and I couldn’t really write off anything else by the end of the year. So my Accountant has always had a pretty easy gig.

Now I’ve started a new role that requires me to record all of my own expenses, and until a few days ago, I was just throwing receipts into a large folder and expecting to sort out the mess at the next tax season. Note: I was expecting to pay my Accountant to sort out the mess.

Recently a friend introduced me to Just The Bill, an online filing system for managing receipts from multiple accounts. Simply take a photo of a receipt, send it to your custom email provided by Just The Bill (i.e. jtb_ljh_@justthebill.com) and sort it through the dashboard to the appropriate account & payment method. At the end of the month, year, or whenever, you can export the file to Excel or Quickbooks (Simply Accounting coming soon) and you (or your Accountant) can plug in the numbers for some good old fashioned crunching. Huge time-saver. Huuuuuuuuuge!

iPhone users will have to wait a bit longer for the app to be released unfortunately, but Blackberry users can start taking advantage of the service immediately. What’s different about using a native app instead of emailing the receipt photo? The receipts can be sorted over the phone, instead of having to login to your account over the web.

There is a catch, however: it’s free for single users and cheap for multiple-user accounts. Pretty sweet catch, IMO.

Like anything new, the biggest problem with Just The Bill I face is remembering to snap a photo of the receipt and send it in. Everything else is super easy from there on – I encourage you to give it a try!

Screenshot of receipt organization page

Screenshot of Dashboard