How to keep track of your receipts and expenses with Wufoo
Hey there, fellow dinosaurs. If you’re like me, you probably have a little too much money on your hands this time of year. But don’t worry at all: the IRS is here to help.
It’s open season on taxes here in the states, and [Wufoo](http://www.wufoo.com/) can help you keep track of all those expenses and receipts like a pro.
Oftentimes, we think of forms when we think of collecting information from someone else. Sometimes though, we can turn the lens around and use Wufoo to collect and organize details about ourselves!
If you’re a small business owner or independent contractor, you might want to keep your business expenses separate from your personal expenses. If you like to keep a personal budget, you can do that too. Here’s how we’ll do it.
First we’re going to want to make a form to collect all of those juicy details about our budget and personal spending.
The best way to do this is to consider this question: What do I buy? Everyone’s answer to this is going to be a bit different. Here’s what I came up with:
As you can see, I have all the important categories nailed down. Now let’s go build it! Head over to Wufoo, and create a new form. The most important bits of information I wanted to track are:
– Type of expense
– Price
– Date of transaction
I’m going to use our Price field to track the cost of each expense. This will let me enter any amount I want, and track that number in the [Entry Manager](http://help.wufoo.com/articles/en_US/SurveyMonkeyArticleType/Entry-Manager). To track each category of expense, I’ve used a [Dropdown](http://www.wufoo.com/guides/item-quantity-without-dropdown/) field. That way, I can come back later and add new Categories if I find they’re a bit lacking.
For those pesky paper receipts, you can use our File Upload field to upload a picture as soon as you get them by using your phone’s camera. In fact, I keep a bookmark to this form on my own personal device so I can log all of those expenses as soon as I make the purchase. Yes, I enjoy things like this.
If you’re eager to take this one step further, take a look at our [Dropbox](http://www.wufoo.com/partners/dropbox/) integration. With this integration, all of those receipts will end up in one folder in Dropbox. They’ll make for a very intriguing slideshow too, so be sure to share that folder with everyone you know! (Don’t actually do that, for friendship’s sake.)
Once you have all of your expenses tracked in Wufoo, it’s easy to use our [Report Builder](http://help.wufoo.com/articles/en_US/SurveyMonkeyArticleType/Report-Builder) to visualize all of the purchases you’ve made. If you like, you can even export all of your data into your favorite spreadsheet program to sum everything up! Or…
For some spreadsheet-packed dinosaur-themed master-level formjitsu, you can save all of your entries in Wufoo directly into Google Sheets using [Zapier](http://www.wufoo.com/2012/08/06/zapier-connects-wufoo-to-dozens-of-web-applications/). WHAT. Yep, it’s the truth. You can learn a bit more about Zapier’s connection between Wufoo and Google Sheets right over [here](https://zapier.com/zapbook/zaps/2/save-all-new-wufoo-entries-into-a-google-spreadsheet/).
Once you have this connection created, you’ll have a beautiful list of all your expenses saved directly in Google Sheets. This means you can use that information to do calculations, create pivot tables, and learn all sorts of fascinating things about your spending habits. But if you ask me, some things may be better left unseen.