5 Best Apps for Simplifying Your 2012 Taxes

Lemon.com
Whether you use Lemon.com or free apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, or Windows Phone, this app allows for users to track expenses and create summary reports without a hassle. Users can also assign categories to their expenses such as health or business. Receipts are typically scanned and converted into searchable, taggable data. In addition to physical copies of receipts, email receipts can be forwarded to a special @lemon.com email address, or business emails can bypass users’ primary inbox and be sent to Lemon. Pricing ranges from a free basic plan, and starting in February, will also offer a family plan for either $9 per month or $50 per year. With a family plan, ten Lemon accounts can be linked.

Expensify.com
Expensify is another useful receipt manager available through iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Windows Phone. It includes ten receipt SmartScans per month. For each additional SmartScan, users pay twenty cents, but users can earn bonus SmartScans by inviting others to join the service. Unlimited receipt uploads and expense imports are also incorporated, as is Evernote syncing. Features such as Freshbooks and QuickBooks are available through paid accounts. Expensify offers users the chance to import their bank account or credit card to follow and organize their finances even more closely.

Doxo.com
Currently, only iPhone offers a mobile version of this service, although Doxo works via web browsers, and an Android version is in the making. Doxo works by syncing accounts with insurance providers, banks, and mortgage lenders so taxpayers have the option to store their bill statements, view them for later, and pay bills online. If a provider is not offered on Doxo, users can simply scan their statement or take a picture with their smartphone and upload the image. In addition to storing online bill statements, users can also store passports, warranties, and other essential documents in the cloud.

iXpenselt
Available only as an iPhone app, iXpenselt works not only as a place to store receipts as Doxo does, it also tracks your monthly expenses. By doing so, iXpenselt builds graphs to illustrate users’ spending habits. This can be used for a wide variety of purposes, whether it is to manage a monthly budget or plan ahead for the tax season.

No matter what app taxpayers choose this tax season, they will certainly be happy to find that organizing receipts and managing budgets is simplified with the help of handy apps such as these.

Nora Phillips has worked years in accounting and contributed to Top Accounting Degrees for others interested in turning their love of numbers into a well-paying career.