I love innovation and especially enjoy simple solutions. Receipt Farm is both; a combination of clever tech and the real world – a service that simplifies expense management by herding loose scraps of paper, via Royal Mail, into a more meaningful and manageable form online.

I hate receipts. I wish I could live without them but despite trying digital solutions — scanning, photographing, relying on online banking or typing expenses into an iPhone app — I still can’t seem to be able to rid myself of all those little scraps of paper.

Receipt Farm has quickly become a part of my life because it is so simple to use:

• Every month I get a stamped addressed envelope (remember those?) and all my receipts (whether personal or business) go in there.
• At the end of the month I seal it up and stick it in the post and my part is done.
• A few days later I get an email from the Receipt Farmers telling me that all my disorganised scraps of paper have been tidily herded, scanned, digested and presented in a single ordered page ready to view online.

By using a combination of optical character recognition and a team of farm-hands the scanned receipts aren’t just stored as images online but the data has been grabbed and I can view dates, company names and all the financial information required to file my expenses. I can also sort by date, payment method, value and, if the data is there, it’ll also grab the time of the transaction and the last four digits of my debit or credit card.

The result? All my receipts are safely ‘backed up’ online and I can get a sortable Excel spreadsheet to slice and dice and separate the useful, and reclaimable, from the rest.

All in all I’m really impressed… as I was beta-testing the service I threw everything I had at them, bus tickets, hand-written cab receipts, a screwed up coffeeshop receipt that I was going to throw away. It handled everything very well with only 2 errors in over 100 receipts. The error rate which will improve over time I’m told but still, if I’d keyed in all those receipts myself I’m sure I would have made as many errors and that would have been a couple of hours typing in Excel.

So what happens to all those receipts? They come back to me and I just file the envelope in case I need the original – this happens every month so if I did need to find a specific receipt (a proof of purchase perhaps) I can look online find out the exact date and find the envelope for that month knowing the receipt will be there.

Overall, I’m seriously impressed by the idea and the execution. At £9.99 a month it’s cheaper than a book keeper, it’s cheaper than spending my time doing the job and… watch this space… there is bound to be an API to link up to other online services — I’m already drooling at the thought of it linked with my online accounting system, or Evernote, or iPhone.

Get 20% off at the Receipt Farm

Special offer for Freelance Advisor readers: Get the basic £9.99 package for £7.99 per month.

To sign up just head on over to ReceiptFarm and enter the discount code ADVISOR20 on the registration page – but be quick as we’ve only got 25 to give away.