TITLE: Managing receipts on fieldwork
DATE: 2019-05-15
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
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ost of the time when I’m doing scientific fieldwork, I have to keep
track of receipts in order to get reimbursed by my funding at a
later date. Keeping track of all these bits of paper over the course
of a long expedition can be really annoying and I have to have some
sort of system in place otherwise I quickly lose the receipts.

Normally, when I get a receipt, I immediately take a picture of it
on my phone, that way even if I lose the receipt, there is a backup.
Forcing this habit is tough at first but I have found it becomes
normal quite quickly. If the receipt is of ambiguous purpose or it’s
lacking some information like the date, I normally scribble this on
a blank area of the receipt before taking the picture. I also have
the same approach for backing up field data in notebooks. Before my
boots come off at the end of the day I take pictures of all the
pages filled in that day and put them on the laptop. It’s saved me
at least once I can remember when a notebook got very wet and one of
the pages got torn. At the end of the day, the receipts go in a
plastic zip folder. Most of the time during the trip, things only go
in this folder, they don’t come out.

Towards the end of a trip, if I have the time and energy (sometimes
it gets done on the flight home), I make a spreadsheet of the
expenses with this information:

  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Item    Date of      Local      Cost      Cost    Description   Notes     Receipt image file
          purchase     currency   (local)   (GBP)                           
  ------- ------------ ---------- --------- ------- ------------- --------- -------------------
  Train   2019_03_01   AOA        12000     29.40   Lubango ->    50% other train_lub_ben.jpg
                                                    Benguela      grant     

  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This makes it easier to keep track of all the costs of the trip and
helps when applying for reimbursement.

In some places, for instance mechanics in Lubango, or a roadside
fruit vendor, providing receipts is not the norm and so I tend to
carry a receipt book around with me. I fill in the cost and ask the
vendor to sign it. However, I would also not recommend claiming for
every tiny little bit of expenditure. My opinion is that there are
some things you can claim on expenses that you would be spending
money on even if you weren’t in the field, such as food, and this
balances out the many small things that it’s really not worth
claiming for, like a beer when out with colleagues. However there is
also the line of thought that one is claiming for expenses to repay
themselves for the potential discomfort of being away from home for
so long.

  {IMAGE}


I’ve seen some people keep track of receipts by stapling them to a
piece of A4 paper. That way the receipts are harder to lose, and
also they can write notes on the A4 page referring to the receipts
with extended descriptions, a breakdown of the cost, and other
necessary information.