When you buy online, the receipt is online too, as a web page, an e-mail, or both. This is handy, but now your receipts are scattered in different places: some are in e-mails, some are printed, and some might even be lost because you neglected to print that web receipt when you were told to.

It gets worse when you try to correlate them with your offline receipts. And if you need those receipts for itemized deductions come tax time, it can get a lot worse.

Here are 3 time-tested ways to help keep things organized:

1. In Safari, mail all web receipts to yourself. When you’re shown a web receipt, choose Mail Contents of This Page from Safari’s File menu. This automatically copies that web page into a new e-mail in Mail which you can then send to yourself. This directs both web and e-mail receipts into one place: your Inbox. And speaking of your Inbox…

2. In Mail, create a Web Receipts folder. Drag all e-mail receipts from your Inbox and drop them into your new Web Receipts folder. If you know how to create a Mail rule, create a rule to do this automatically for receipts you receive frequently. You might be able to use Spotlight or Mail’s Find feature to find the receipts as well, but since receipts arrive with different wording, it’s hard to know what to search for. Just drop them into your new Web Receipts mail folder and you’ll have them handy in one place.

3. In Mail, save all receipts as PDFs.

Choose Print from the File menu, then choose Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder from the PDF popup menu in the lower-left corner of the Print window. Your receipt ends up in a Web Receipts folder sitting in your Documents folder. (This is a Finder folder, different from the Web Receipts folder you created in Mail.) This creates duplicates of those e-mails now sitting in your new mail folder, but where receipts are concerned, a belts-and-suspenders caution can be useful.

Yes, it’s confusing to choose something called Print to do something called “Save”. This incredibly powerful feature is made possible by Mac OS X’s built-in PDF Services. You don’t technically need to print to use PDF Services, so Apple will probably straighten out this user-interface awkwardness eventually, perhaps in Leopard.

Just remember: receipts go in your Web Receipts folders.

You have two Web Receipts folders, one in Mail and one in Finder. Save your receipts in both, and rest easier.

Tuesday, May 29th, 2007, 12:03 am    Both comments and pings are currently closed.