95 / 116
E L E C T R I C A L CO N N E C T I O N
S UMM E R 2 0 16
9 5
TIPS
S
hoeboxed Australia is an ATO-
registered company that enables
tradies and other small business
owners to keep track of their business
paperwork instead of keeping them in
a drawer somewhere or, as the name
implies, a shoebox.
Users can choose to physically
post their receipts in, use the mobile
app to take a photo and log the receipt
or forward emailed documents into
their account.
“Shoeboxed is a way of getting
small-business paperwork and putting
it online. It can be anything from paper
documents you’ve received, emails, or
pictures taken on your mobile phone.
We then store that online and organise
it for you. We are the only product of
this kind that is registered with the
ATO and fully tax compliant,” says
Shoeboxed Australia founder and chief
executive Simon Foster.
“Tradies can take a picture with
their phone while they’re on the go so
they won’t lose those recepts or forget
about them. Shoeboxed documents
don’t fade and it’s dealt with there and
then – you’re not looking at the end of
the year with a literal shoebox full of
documents that you have to then give
to your accountant, or your spouse,
who’s going to sit there for a couple of
days typing it all in.”
Documents are digitised through
an Optical Character Recognition
(OCR) process to extract the data.
The data is then verified by workers
in the company’s Sydney office to
ensure its accuracy.
“We do all our own data entry and we
use people, not computer algorithms,
to do it. The reason for that is when you
extract information from documents
using technology it gets you to about
85% accuracy. In order to use it for
financial records you need to be more
accurate than that, as close to 100%
as you can possibly get, and there’s no
alternative to using people. That
means we either need to ask the
customer to do it – and our experience
with small businesses is they don’t
have time to do that and they don’t
want to do that – or we employ people.
We do it on-shore in our offices in
Sydney. We use long-term unemployed
people on federal government grants
to enable us to keep it on-shore – it’s
not going offshore, so you can keep
control of it here.”
Shoeboxed has been in Australia
for almost six years and originally
came out in the US about 10 years ago.
Half way through 2015 Simon and co.
separated from their US colleagues by
buying the business out so they could
focus entirely on Australia and New
Zealand. According to Simon, the move
has allowed Shoeboxed Australia to
make sure they’re handling the unique
tax and compliance requirements of
Australian businesses.
“If you have a lot of documents
you want to sort and organise for tax
compliance, if you’ve had issues with
people losing documents, if are behind
on your tax returns and BAS filing or
just want to be more efficient and go
paperless – we can help.”
Shoeboxed is charged on a monthly
basis and has a range of plans from
individual to executive and offers
free training and certification for
accountants and bookkeepers on
their software.
Shoeboxed
www.shoeboxed.com.auWHAT’S IN THE BOX?
Keeping hold of tax receipts
and business expenses,
then sorting through them
all come tax time, is the bane
of many-a-tradie’s existence.
Enter Shoeboxed: an app that
organises your paperwork
for you.