Sorting receipts for taxes

You pretty much have the categories. Depending on your accountant he/she may have a few others. You will also need to know how much you paid in interest on your truck note. Also number of days on road for your per diem. My account has categories of fuel additives, tires, and weight tickets.

 

I breaking down repairs/maintenance even further this year to track cost of oil, fuel additive, lights, tires, etc. Not really necessary but I just want to know how much $$$ is going where. I do this by having sub categories under repairs/maintenance. I use QuickBooks Pro and do my own accounting. The hardest part was getting it set up right for a trucking company and I had prior experience with it as a resort manager. Otherwise it might be beneficial to have an accountant do that much at least.

 

12 folders:

January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December

At the end of each month I enter the data into Quicken Home & Business, adding categories (or subcategories) as necessary.

 

I sort by month, then list everything by item, so I can compare month to month, and year to year, apples to apples.

Working with digital spreadsheets, there is no reason not to track expenses at such high resolution. The main purpose of lumping expenses into categories was keeping them legible on letter sized paper. Using such fine data properly, you can determine what and how much of it you need to buy, and weigh your options rationally, rather than wasting money buying what you need wherever you are when you happen to need it. You won't know if buying oil by the drum, fuel additive by the case, or washer fluid by the tote makes sense for you until you have the data in front of you.

For taxes you can pull up items over a defined period with a few keystrokes. If you start making up arbitrary categories there is no way to check the accuracy of that category other than starting on the data in one or more categories from scratch.

 

I used to scan the receipts, but just sorting them by month and entering them by item in that month suffices. I rarely have more than 100 receipts a month, so they're easy enough to go through if I need to find something.

 

I use ATBS, a truck specialty bookkeeping service. Mail them receipts monthly. They did a good job on my 2013 tax filings, were good with communicating with me on the fine points. To me, taxes are the critical test of any bookkeeping, my own or a hired service. You might look at OOIDA, they have some good resources available. You also might save yourself some unnecessary work by looking at the IRS website for what's included in the tax deduction on per diem for transportation workers.

 

Just a suggestion - print off IRS schedule C and make sure your categories match what you're going to have to put on your tax return, especially if you do your own taxes/accounting. My first year I had everything tallied up on my own "special" spreadsheet the way it made sense to me but it wasn't so easy to translate it over to the IRS schedule.

QuickBooks is good but the key is getting it set up right. It's not so trucking business friendly out of the box.