Lemon – Organized Receipts for Easier Recordkeeping

Lemon is an online tool that people can use to keep their receipts organized for better expense reporting and financial recordkeeping. Ideally suited for people who shop online frequently for business or pleasure, Lemon stores digital receipts and paper receipts in a single spot. It even provides users with a special email address where they can have merchants send their e-receipts for instant integration with their Lemon accounts.

If your wallet is overflowing and your accountant is irritated at the shoebox of receipts you brought in last year, then now is the time to get organized before tax season. Head to the Lemon website, enter your email address, choose a username—which doubles as the @lemon.com email address you’ll use for e-receipts—and create a password to begin. The first step to getting your finances in order will be to snap digital photos of all the receipts in your wallet and upload those images using the Lemon mobile app. Send any online receipts you have clogging up your inbox to your new @lemon.com email address, and the web-app will automatically cull all the important data on your behalf. Once your receipts are digitized, it’s easy to see all types of financial information, such as how much money you’re spending at certain stores and in selected categories like food or business. Lemon even creates custom graphs that you can use to visually see where your money is going each month.

The receipts you’ve saved with Lemon are stored in the cloud, which means they’re accessible from anywhere at any time—assuming you’ve got a computer or mobile phone handy. Whether you’re looking to return a blouse you bought last month or get reimbursed for paper supplies you bought for your employer last week, Lemon can make it easier to find the receipt you’re looking for at a moment’s notice.

Practical Uses:

• Get reimbursed for a business dinner you paid for out of pocket
• Find out how much money you spend at Starbucks each week
• Return clothes to a department store even after you’ve thrown away the receipt
• Create a personal budget based on how much money you really spend each month

Insider Tips:

• Set up your online accounts to automatically send e-receipts to your Lemon email address
• Take photos of receipts from any mobile phone with a camera
• Virtually any receipt can be scanned and digitized with the Lemon mobile app
• Lemon will let you know if a particular receipt can’t be deciphered

What we liked:

• Lemon makes it easy save business receipts and submit expense reports
• Data from receipts is automatically collected without any chance for user error
• Users can tag and label specific receipts
• Lemon works with both paper receipts and digital e-receipts

What we didn’t like:

• Users have to sign up for a paid plan to export their receipts

Alternatives:

• Expensify – https://www.expensify.com
• Receipt Bank – http://www.receipt-bank.com
• Shoeboxed – http://www.shoeboxed.com

Company Info:

• Launched: October 2011
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: Palo Alto, California
• Web site: http://lemon.com

Costs:

• Free plan
• Most Popular plan is $7.99/month
• Business Premium plan is $15.99/month