About Shoeboxed
Hey, this is Doug. I'm the owner and CEO of Shoeboxed. Let me tell you a little about us, how we can serve you, and why I bet my house on this company.
I run Shoeboxed to be your ally for keeping more of every tax dollar you've earned. We help Schedule C filers, freelancers, and entrepreneurs claim every deduction the IRS lets us take, sleep at night knowing our records will hold up under audit, and stop leaving thousands of dollars on the table every spring. We've been doing this since 2007 from our Durham, North Carolina office. More than 550,000 small business owners across all 50 states have trusted us with their receipts and miles.
What we do for you
- Track your miles. Keep the deduction. Our mobile app logs every business trip by GPS in the background and texts you a daily summary so you confirm with one tap. No manual logging. No remembering to start or stop trips. Twelve thousand business miles a year at the 2026 IRS rate is an $8,700 deduction. Most self-employed drivers leave it on the table because they forget to track miles. We make it impossible to forget.
- Mail us your pesky paper receipts. We turn them into tax deductions. Stuff a month's worth into our postage-paid Magic Envelope, drop it in any mailbox, and a real human in our Durham office scans, sorts, and categorizes every one into your account using the 15-category system we built from analyzing 2.4 million real small-business receipts. We're the only receipt-tracking service in America that processes paper. The kitchen-counter pile becomes deductions you can defend.
- A phone app that makes receipt tracking and expense reporting a breeze. Snap a photo of any receipt. We OCR the text, categorize the expense, and upload it to your account in seconds. The same fifteen-category system runs across the app, the Magic Envelope, and email forwards.
- Audit-ready records, always. Every receipt and every business mile lands in IRS-ready digital records you can export and save, or just keep in your Shoeboxed account. We'll keep them ready for you as long as you're a customer. If you ever get audited, your records hold up.
- Free helpful tools to help you save more on taxes. Our home office deduction calculator, free mileage log template, and free expense report template are yours whether you ever sign up or not.
Who we serve
Shoeboxed exists for Schedule C filers (self-employed people, freelancers, and sole proprietors) who run their business from a home office and drive for work. That includes:
- Realtors and real estate professionals
- Coaches, therapists, and consultants
- Lawyers and CPAs working from home
- Owner-operator truckers
- Independent contractors of every stripe
- Physical therapists and small healthcare practices
- Small SaaS founders and indie product builders
- Hospitality and B&B owners
If you chose entrepreneurship because you wanted freedom from a corporate paycheck, we built Shoeboxed for you.
Our story
In 2007, two Duke University seniors saw a problem they couldn't ignore. Small business owners across America were drowning in paper receipts. Pizza receipts shoved in glove boxes. Office supply receipts in actual shoeboxes under the bed. Toll receipts in coat pockets that never made it out of the dryer. Every spring, those receipts became a guessing game at tax time, and every spring small business owners left thousands of dollars in legal deductions on the table because they couldn't find the proof.
So Taylor Mingos and Tobias Walter built the Magic Envelope. Mail us your pile, they said, and we'll scan, sort, and categorize every receipt for you. They moved the company to Durham, North Carolina that fall, set up an office a few blocks from Duke, and got to work. Nobody else was scanning paper receipts for small businesses. Eighteen years later, we're still the only ones who do it at scale and affordably for people like you.
More than 550,000 small business owners and entrepreneurs have trusted us with their receipts since then. The hairdresser running her salon. The realtor making quarterly tax payments. The owner-operator trucker who keeps a year's worth of fuel receipts in a manila envelope under the truck seat. The therapist working from a home office. They mail us their piles. We turn the piles into tax deductions.
The mission has never changed. We exist to help small business owners and entrepreneurs save the most money they're legally entitled to save at tax time. We're your ally in that fight. And it's a real fight, because the system isn't built for us. Big companies get $500-an-hour accountants on retainer. We get an hour with our CPA once a year, if we're lucky. We pay full retail on every business expense and we leave thousands of legal deductions on the table because nobody told us they existed or because tracking felt impossible. According to IRS data, roughly 82% of eligible filers don't even claim the home office deduction. That's real money left on the table.
That's the fight and the challenge. Shoeboxed exists to help you at and tilt the scales back in your favor. Think of us as that ultra-helpful, somewhat nerdy accountant friend who just wants to help you keep a bit more of your hard-earned cash in your bank account, and out of the tax-man's hands.
In late 2025, I bought Shoeboxed. I'm a five-time CEO who got tired of working for other people and wanted to own and run my own thing. I'd used Shoeboxed back in 2010 when I was running marketing at HomeFinder.com and my team mailed in a pile of business cards from a trade show. I called it "magical" at the time, and the word stuck. Fifteen years later, after running companies across SaaS, e-commerce, and marketplace platforms, I walked away from another five-year corporate CEO commitment and decided to make owning and running Shoeboxed my next adventure.
I bought the company with an SBA loan and a personal guarantee. The bank takes my house if the business goes sideways (no pressure!). There's no parent company, no escape hatch, no Plan B. Just the bet that small business owners and entrepreneurs are the backbone of the American story, and that we deserve allies who are rooting for us every single day.
That's the bet I'm making. We're rooting for you.
More about me
I've spent the last fifteen years running other people's companies. Before Shoeboxed, I was CEO at MDHearing (which sells hearing aids), Scripted (which helped small businesses hire freelance writers), Earth Class Mail (which scanned people's mail and offered virtual addresses/mailboxes), and HomeFinder (a real-estate listings site). Five companies, plenty of hard Mondays, but a blast and fun in it's own right. In the end I just wanted to own and run my own thing.
I am now a Schedule C filer myself. I run Shoeboxed from a home office, I drive for the business, and I use the Magic Envelope for those pesky paper receipts. The random pile of receipts? I have one too. I bought this company because I wanted to spend the rest of my career making the lives of small business owners and entrepreneurs easier at tax time, including my own.
I figured it out on a Sunday-morning walk. I'd just spent five years running someone else's company, and I was about to sign on for another five. Standing there on the beach, I asked myself a simple question: What do I want my story to be?
You've probably had a version of that same moment yourself. Maybe you were on a long stretch of highway with the radio off. Maybe you were driving home from a job site after a long day. Maybe you were between showings on a Saturday afternoon. Maybe you were at the kitchen table after the kids went to bed. The question is the same. Only the scenery changes.
The full SBA loan story is on the blog. You can connect with me on LinkedIn.
Our team in Durham
Our support and paper receipt scanning team works from our Durham office at 3414 North Duke Street, three blocks from where Taylor founded the company in 2007.
- Amy Wilson, Client Success Manager
- Jennifer Wilson, Client Support Manager
- Morgan Price, Operations Manager
When you call (888) 369-4269, a real human picks up. Monday through Friday, 9 to 5 Eastern. When you email [email protected], a real human writes back. We've answered thousands of emails and had thousands of phone conversations in the last year.
Two recent App Store reviews:
"Every time I have an issue and send an email to the Shoeboxed support team they respond quickly and clearly. Every time they have exceeded my expectations."
"The Shoeboxed support team is phenomenal too. Real people who are actually helpful, responsive, and willing to go the extra mile."
No chatbots. No outsourced call center. Real US humans in Durham, who care about your business as much as you do.
What we promise
I made the same promise to the team in my first all-hands meeting that we make to our customers:
- Success. We will grow Shoeboxed. We'll keep building features and tools that put real money back in your pocket. We'll keep offering support from real humans right here in the USA. We'll be here in another twenty years.
- Integrity. We'll do the work the right way. We won't sell your data to annoying advertisers. We won't trick you into upgrades you don't need. When we screw up, we'll tell you. When we charge you, you'll know exactly what for.
Get in touch
- Try Shoeboxed risk-free for 30 days at shoeboxed.com/pricing. If it doesn't work for you in the first 30 days, we refund every dollar.
- Use our free home office deduction calculator to see what your home office is worth at tax time.
- Email: [email protected]
- Phone: (888) 369-4269 (Monday-Friday, 9 AM-5 PM Eastern)
- Connect with Doug: LinkedIn
Mailing address:
Shoeboxed.com
3414 North Duke Street, Suite 200
Durham, NC 27704
We're rooting for you.