How do freelancers keep track of receipts?

Freelancers have the worst receipt mix of any working group: subscriptions, coffee meetings, hardware, travel, home-office spend, random reimbursables, and the occasional supermarket run that is half personal and half business. The right system is not "store every receipt". It is "make the business ones obvious fast".

Separate payment first, then separate receipts

If you only change one thing, open a dedicated business account or card. A clean account makes missed receipts visible immediately. Without that, every month-end review turns into detective work about whether a purchase was client work, home use, or both.

Capture based on how the receipt arrives

Freelancers usually need three intake paths, not one. Photograph paper receipts as they happen. Forward supplier emails and subscription invoices the same day they arrive. Upload PDFs you download from billing portals before they vanish into your Downloads folder. The system works best when each type of receipt has an obvious path in.

Use categories your accountant will recognise

"Business stuff" is not a useful category. Better starting categories are software, home office, equipment, travel, education, contractors, and marketing. If you bill multiple clients, add tags or notes for the client or project so you can answer questions like "how much did Project Atlas actually cost me?" without reading every line item one by one.

Write the business purpose while it is still obvious

A restaurant receipt is weak evidence on its own. "Client lunch with Acme re: onboarding proposal" is much stronger. Same with petrol, parking, and mixed-use purchases. The note is often what turns a plausible claim into a defensible one.

Do a month-end close, not a year-end rescue

Freelancers do not need enterprise accounting rituals, but a 15-minute month-end close is worth it. Check that all bank transactions have matching receipts, categorise anything still sitting in a generic bucket, and fix the oddball purchases while you still remember them. Leave it until tax time and you will either under-claim or over-explain.

Make the accountant handoff boring

The ideal handoff is a clean export plus the supporting receipts already attached to the right records. That cuts back on email ping-pong, reduces billable cleanup time, and makes it easier to answer audit questions later. In rct-keep, that usually means categories, notes, and the tax-year summary are doing most of the heavy lifting.