How To Save Travel Receipts

This short how-to blog entry is for people who travel and need to save their receipts so they can get reimbursed.

If you just put the receipts in your wallet, they are likely to get mixed up with other receipts you have in there, requiring you to sort them later. Also, in a wallet they can get dirty and smudged beyond readabiltiy. Finally, some receipts are full-sized sheets of paper.

Buy one of those dollar store pencil holders that are meant to go in students' wallets. It's big enough for a bunch of receipts, and full-paper sized ones can be folded in half for it. It has a zipper so things don't fall out.

Keep it in your purse of travel bag (along with your book, notebook, and ipod.)

If you're driving, fill your car up with gas before you leave. If you refill while you're gone, save those receipts. Then, when you return home, fill the car up again. The receipt you get from that will be the exact amount of gas you used for your trip.

Then, when you get back, all the receipts for a given trip are in one secure place.

What I do then is tape each one to a piece of scrap printer paper, so they all effectively become the same size and the secretary can page through them easily.

Pictured is a chicken, for no reason at all.