Best Practices for Managing Paper Receipts
I store all my receipts digitally, and make sure to input them into accounting program sooner than later, just so I don't forget about it. For practical purposes, the two important things are: Any kind of a digital system makes this pretty easy, even just putting the sums in a spreadsheet and the receipts into files with the date in the name. However, because it's easy enough, I also have a box where I stuff the paper receipts. I expect never to need them, but should something very weird happen to my computer and backups, they would be there.
"This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](http://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2017/06/09/ABBA-An-Agent-Based-Model-of-the-Banking-System-44916) reduced by 60%. (I'm a bot) ***** &gt; The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF, its Executive Board, or IMF management.  &gt; A thorough analysis of risks in the banking system requires incorporating banks&amp;#039; inherent heterogeneity and adaptive behavior in response to shocks and changes in business conditions and the regulatory environment.  &gt; ABBA is an agent-based model for analyzing risks in the banking system in which banks&amp;#039; business decisions drive the endogenous formation of interbank networks.   ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/6gegcw/imfabba_an_agentbased_model_of_the_banking/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ ""Version 1.65, ~140832 tl;drs so far."") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr ""PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome."") | *Top* *keywords*: **banks**^#1 **IMF**^#2 **risk**^#3 **view**^#4 **author(s**^#5" "From the poster's description of this activity, it doesn't look like he is engaged in a business, so Schedule C would not be appropriate. The first paragraph of the IRS Instructions for Schedule C is as follows: Use Schedule C (Form 1040) to report income or loss from a business   you operated or a profession you practiced as a sole proprietor. An   activity qualifies as a business if your primary purpose for engaging   in the activity is for income or profit and you are involved in the   activity with continuity and regularity. For example, a sporadic   activity or a hobby does not qualify as a business. To report income   from a nonbusiness activity, see the instructions for Form 1040, line   21, or Form 1040NR, line 21. What the poster is doing is acting as a nominee or agent for his members. For instance, if I give you $3.00 and ask you to go into Starbucks and buy me a pumpkin-spice latte, you do not have income or receipts of $3.00, and you are not engaged in a business. The amounts that the poster's members are forwarding him are like this.  Money that the poster receives for his trouble should be reported as nonbusiness income on Line 21 of Form 1040, in accordance with the instructions quoted above and the instructions for Form 1040. Finally, it should be noted that the poster cannot take deductions or losses relating to this activity. So he can't deduct any expenses of organizing the group buy on his tax return. Of course, this would not be the case if the group buy really is the poster's business and not just a ""hobby."" Of course, it goes without saying that the poster should document all of this activity with receipts, contemporaneous emails (and if available, contracts) - as well as anything else that could possibly be relevant to proving the nature of this activity in the event of an audit." “Chase’s tellers do not have the authority to close an account…” That’s a “truthy” bit of bullshit. Yes, a teller themselves do not have the authority to close an account. But if you are the owner of the account and you state to the teller that you would like to withdraw all of your money into a cashier’s check so as to close the account they cannot refuse you. Since they fed you this nonsense, they might play some delaying tactics like calling a manager and having them talk to you tough the window and such. But just stand your ground and state you would like to close the account and withdraw all funds. Now if they were extra slimy and if you were to withdraw all funds but they let the zero balance float for a bit so they could claim a fee on you, bullshit once again. You should take any notice of fees coupled with a dated receipt showing the date you withdrew funds, go to the branch and complain to the manager right away. State clearly you will not pay any fees and you would like written verification that your account is closed. Also—and this goes without saying and is implied above—but be sure to keep copies of all if your receipts and transactions. If they state they want to hold onto something, demand they make a copy. And for your own safety/sanity keep your own backup copies somewhere safe at home. All of that said, I have seen modern consumer bankers really act like a bunch of slimeballs in the past decade or so, but generally this has still been an exception to the rule. The reality is if you do not want to have your money in their bank it’s in their best interest to let go of you as soon as possible; especially if you have a small amount of money such as $1,500 at stake. Remember your rights as a consumer, remember it’s your money and remember—and remind them—that you can report them if they deny you reasonable access to your funds. Sears is great for tools, but kind of useless for other stuff, and their cashiers are always giving you a sales pitch (Sears Card, etc.) and several miles of receipt paper. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, I JUST WANT TO BUY A WRENCH! It kind of reminds me of Best Buy, who is actually even worse with this, but just happens to have more products that I'm interested in. This is interesting.  The application I'm putting together is more along the lines of automating the research process for a financial professional using a personal algorithm of his.  The end goal is to provide him an alert to email when a new report is filed and if his criteria are met based on that report and past reports.  Thanks anyway. "For me, the main benefit of using duplicate checks is that the copy is created automatically.  If I had to take an extra step, whether taking a photo or writing on a stub, I would probably not always remember to do it.  There is also the issue that you might need to write a check when you don't have your smartphone with you, or it is broken or has a dead battery, etc. There are various pros and cons of having an electronic record versus a paper record.  A paper copy of a check is more vulnerable to physical loss or intrusion, but an electronic record is more vulnerable to hacking.  You also have to keep the images organized somehow, and take care of data security and backups for the images.  You'll have to evaluate which is the greater concern for you. A minor side point is that check duplicates often omit the account number and obscure your signature.  A photo of the original check would include both of these. As far as ""evidence"", it seems to me they're both equally good evidence that you wrote the check - but that's not really that useful.  In most sorts of disputes, what you would need to prove is that you actually delivered the check to the intended recipient, and neither the photo nor the paper copy is evidence of that.  You could have written the check, taken your photo / copy, and then torn it up." I see that at work too. People too ignorant to use Excel to store financial information so they hand you a sheet of paper with 20 ticker tape receipts from a ticker tape calculator showing how they added up numbers as support for a transaction...really? How much money is this costing the company on an annual basis?! Ticker tape fades, our soft documents are backed up off site nightly...  EDIT: There are a lot of jobs (private and public sector) that are simply obsolete but people cling to them anyway because of politics and general organizational-disorganization. "I think the ""right"" way to approach this is for your personal books and your business's books to be completely separate. You would need to really think of them as separate things, such that rather than being disappointed that there's no ""cross transactions"" between files, you think of it as ""In my personal account I invested in a new business like any other investment"" with a transfer from your personal account to a Stock or other investment account in your company, and ""This business received some additional capital"" which one handles with a transfer (probably from Equity) to its checking account or the like. Yes, you don't get the built-in checks that you entered the same dollar amount in each, but (1) you need to reconcile your books against reality anyway occasionally, so errors should get caught, and (2) the transactions really are separate things from each entity's perspective. The main way to ""hack it"" would be to have separate top-level placeholder accounts for the business's Equity, Income, Expenses, and Assets/Liabilities. That is, your top-level accounts would be ""Personal Equity"", ""Business Equity"", ""Personal Income"", ""Business Income"", and so on. You can combine Assets and Liabilities within a single top-level account if you want, which may help you with that ""outlook of my business value"" you're looking for. (In fact, in my personal books, I have in the ""Current Assets"" account both normal things like my Checking account, but also my credit cards, because once I spend the money on my credit card I want to think of the money as being gone, since it is. Obviously this isn't ""standard accounting"" in any way, but it works well for what I use it for.) You could also just have within each ""normal"" top-level placeholder account, a placeholder account for both ""Personal"" and ""My Business"", to at least have a consistent structure. Depending on how your business is getting taxed in your jurisdiction, this may even be closer to how your taxing authorities treat things (if, for instance, the business income all goes on your personal tax return, but on a separate form). Regardless of how you set up the accounts, you can then create reports and filter them to include just that set of business accounts. I can see how just looking at the account list and transaction registers can be useful for many things, but the reporting does let you look at everything you need and handles much better when you want to look through a filter to just part of your financial picture. Once you set up the reporting (and you can report on lists of account balances, as well as transaction lists, and lots of other things), you can save them as Custom Reports, and then open them up whenever you want. You can even just leave a report tab (or several) open, and switch to it (refreshing it if needed) just like you might switch to the main Account List tab. I suspect once you got it set up and tried it for a while you'd find it quite satisfactory."