I’m a retired pastor and I send my taxes to a previous church member/financial consultant but what I send requires significant work because of the special IRS status of clergy. Much of our household expenses are deductions for our taxes. I used to use Mariner’s Paperless, which was perfect. It is no longer supported. I went to a program called Receipts (now Receipts Space) which is clumsy and the report function is not real good. Also, after going to the new app I have tried 3 times to get the developer to answer a question that would help me with the program. Last year the developer did respond to a question regarding the earlier version, this year I have assistance 3 times and have had no response.
I would use a spreadsheet but it would be too large a document for my needs.
I urgently need a new program that will allow me to enter financial information in a specific way. I need it to allow me to:
import PDFs of scanned store receipts
include contacts (providers, specific individuals, etc.)
include categories (like Donations, Housing Expenses, Utilities, etc)
include notes for each item that specify details
each item will be listed by date of the item
can provide totals for each of the categories
allows me to print up reports where I can resize the columns, limit the report to a given category, and have a final total of the category included. Also the ability to print the whole report as a separate printout.
My first thought was Quicken Classic, but after reading the list of things you need, I don’t think that would do. Quicken Classic is can process input from your credit card or bank accounts, and list categories, but it doesn’t leave much room for notes and I don’t think it can input scanned store receipts. I think you need some simple business accounting app, but I don’t know any to recommend. Quick Books might be an option, but I don’t know it.
I think that expense management software might be what you are looking for. For example, the cloud-based Expensify does nearly everything on your list.
You can scan receipts directly into Expensify using the mobile app, and I presume you mostly mean “vendors” when you say “contacts”.
There is a nice “rules” capability that can automatically process receipts based on various criteria, like all receipts from a particular vendor can be automatically tagged, categorized, etc. It comes with a decent set of pre-configured reports, but IIRC, you can customize reports to varying degrees depending on your subscription.
In the worst case, you can export your expenses to a CSV file and customize as needed in a spreadsheet program. It looks like the entry level subscription is $5/month.
I am a fan and huge proponent of Tiny Books. I’m always surprised when one-person businesses wrestle with Quicken. Tiny Books is old school in appearance but rock solid and easy. I’ve been using it for at least 15 years
Thanks for the recommendation, I wasn’t aware of this app but on first glance it looks like a decent option for a sole trader. It definitely has an old school gui It’s quaint.
To manage receipts for our small business, we’ve found SparkReceipt excellent. SparkReceipt works on both iOS and Android to allow us to scan receipts and have them show up in a spreadsheet automatically (no human intervention). The spreadsheet is available in the desktop web version.
This is probably quite similar to Expensify. It’s hard to find the pricing but it’s €5/month/user.
SparkRecipt is also subscription software at $5.75/month. We bought a few seats on a lifetime deal. SparkReceipt is great for the EU (where receipts are multilingual and more complex). Expensify may be better for US (haven’t tried it).
Neither are full scale accounting packages but perhaps with receipts separate the spreadsheet would work for the monthly summaries with separate reports the expenses.
Thank you all for your responses. I know it is a difficult thing to find grrr. So I will be stuck with having to use Excel, which is sort of like using a hammer to clean a window - shards all over the place lol.
The free, open source program Manager.io has a Receipts facility that meets your needs.
Even though it is a sophisticated accounting program, you can ignore most of it.
To setup the program, be sure its window is wide enough to display a vertical pane on the left that begins “Summary”, “Bank and Cash Accounts”, etc and ends with “Customize”. Click Customize, then enable Receipts and Customers, then click the Update button at the bottom.
For each of your Categories, create a “Profit & Loss Account” (PDF user guide, page 66, bottom).
Add each of your contacts as a Customer.
Now you can enter each receipt in the Receipts pane of the program, which includes all your desired fields.
thank you for the suggestion. Unfortunately the Mac app installer it downloaded will not work on my iMac 2019 running Sequoia 15.7.2 Much appreciate the suggestion though. I also would have concerns as to how much access the developer would have to my data. I’m trying now to see if I can run the original Paperless program even though it no longer is supported. Hoping one of. my older Macs will help. It was such a great program. Thanks again!
I’m also running Sequoia on an Intel Mac. The main download button on the Manager.io page is for Apple Silicon. Click the link below: “Alternative download for Intel-based Macs”.
I use Little Snitch to block apps from phoning home (among other things). Little Snitch does not report the Manager.io Mac app attempting to send any network communications. It doesn’t even check for updates.
Thank you Bob for clarifying. I located the correct version and am downloading now. I was confused about your answer re: who has access to my data. Long ago I used Little Snitch but, frankly, it is way beyond my $$ right now ;-). Are you saying that you did not find any unacceptalbe efforts to access your data?
Little Snitch reports that Manager.io never attempts to access the internet for anything. Therefore, your data will not be transmitted to the developer or anyone else, regardless of whether you use Little Snitch.
I had a few spare minutes today so downloaded and installed Manager.
Wow, what a surprise. For a ‘free forever’ desktop app it looks really nice, it’s easy to set up the basics, and I’m sure has all the functions I’ll ever need. There’s a paid cloud version for multi-user, but as a sole trader I have no need for that. It’s cool it’s also available for Linux.
I very much appreciate the recommendation. I can easily see myself deferring to this over my custom Filemaker solution (mindful that I expect my perpetual copy of FMP to cease working with some future OS update).
Thanks for the suggestion of Manager. It turned out it was too complicated for my simple old brain to figure out lol. But eve better!! I had forgotten that it is my custom when I download a new program not from the App Store but from online I always copy the dmg download to a Dropbox folder. Remembering that I went back to that folder and found Mariners Paperless app dmg there!! So I copied it to my main drive and installed Paperless and lo and behold it works!! I backed up Paperless regularly to a Dropbox folder called Paperless Backups and so opening the zip file from the last year I used it I found all sorts of data that reminded me how to use it. So much easier than trying to make an Excel spreadsheet meet my needs - faster, better report format, and so much more to what I need.
Thank you again for all your help. Glad you both have a program you can use, too.
It’s quaint.