Are you making the most of receipt capture technology in your business?
This brilliant time saver is a firm favourite with our clients (and us too!) – not sure what it involves? MD Jenny is here to take you through the basics.
Not able to watch the video? Scroll down to find a full transcript.
“Hello and welcome to the next episode of Ask the Accountants!
I’m Jenny, one of the directors here at Bickerstaffs. This week, we’ve been contacted by Will who says that he’s heard his self-employed friends talk about using receipt capture, but he doesn’t understand what it is or why it might help his business?
Ok Will, great question, and hopefully by the end of this video you’ll know more about receipt capture and be able to decide if you want to give it a go!
So receipt capture has been around for about 10 years and is now one of the most popular business tools to keep track of receipts, bills, invoices and bank statements.
In a nutshell you use the receipt capture app on your smartphone to take a photo of paperwork, which is then automatically integrated with your accounting software.
The clever bit is the way that the receipt capture technology can recognise what is written on the documents you photograph.
Let’s look at how it could work in practice. Imagine you’re taking an important client out for lunch. Once you’ve hopefully shaken on a new contract and you’ve settled the bill, you would normally stuff the receipt in your pocket or the back of your wallet, to be manually input ‘at some point’ in the future.
However, if you’re using receipt capture and you have the app on your phone, as soon as you get back in the car or reach the office, you can just take a quick snap of the receipt to extract the data, then scrap the physical copy entirely – how easy is that?
As you would have already connected your accounting software, you’ll then be able to ping over all the receipt details from your lunch, so they’ll be ready and waiting when it comes time to do your financial admin.
So the next thing to consider is just what software do you need? Quickbooks and Xero have their own built-in receipt capture technology, or you can use third party software such as Receipt Bank.
We’ve got lots of clients who use receipt capture, and we even use it ourselves, and we haven’t found one person who doesn’t love it! Who doesn’t love less spreadsheets and more free time – even as accountants we like less spreadsheets!
So Will and anyone else out there thinking about getting onboard with receipt capture, we hope this has helped shed a bit more light on what it is and how useful it can be for all sorts of businesses.
If you want to know more, or you’re keen to get started, we’re happy to have a chat about your individual needs, and don’t forget to send us any of your burning questions and you may see yourself pop up on a future episode of Ask the Accountants!”