expenses

You should be working for an agency that pays for housing, per diems, and travel. Unless you have an unusual tax or financial situation, you will do much better by accepting these tax free reimbursements than all the hassle of saving receipts without gaining at the end of the year via deductions on your tax return.

To answer your specific question, a spreadsheet such as Excel will help you organize. Personally, I scan all my receipts and also place the amounts into Quickbooks, a financial program for businesses. Each item is in a category that aligns with a line on my business tax return. Quicken is the consumer version of Quickbooks (at least for Macs) and can do the same thing for personal returns. I also use that program for my personal finances, but since I never itemize my personal tax return, I don't put my receipts into line items for tax purposes. But that is the most popular program out there for personal finances but I'm not sure it is the best. There are a lot of critics out there. It will download your bank statements and help you reconcile your receipts with your statements. And it will zoom all your records into their tax program to help you file your return.

None of that will really help you directly do your tax planning. For that you will either need personal understanding of the unique tax laws that apply to healthcare travelers, or get expert tax preparation from professionals who do understand our special situation, such as TravelTax (google him).

Thanks for the information. That was helpful.