If you have ever struggled getting your expenses in order, don’t despair – it happens to the best of us! But there are also plenty of smart solutions, to make sorting out your expenses and invoicing easier.
And as a virtual assistant helping many businesses, we are in a great position to take a look at those solutions, road test them and decide which offer the best advantages for busy business people – our clients, in other words. One of the best systems we have seen is Receipt Bank.
What Receipt Bank does, is to extract vital information from receipts, bills and invoices, reducing the need to enter information by hand. By making the process quicker and more efficient, it becomes easier to work out expenses and create the sort of detailed reports that many businesses need.
Bills and receipts can be entered by photographing them on a smartphone, sending an email copy, or even posting them in an envelope, in the mail. Whichever way they arrive, the documents will then be scanned and the important information extracted, and saved in a useful format.
And Receipt Bank integrates with many common accounting systems including QuickBooks, Sage, KashFlow, and our preferred bookkeeping and accounting platform, Xero.
One of the great things about Receipt Bank is that it was devised by a busy small business owner, who was fed up with the time and money he routinely lost, crashing accountant’s deadlines and getting all his administration up to date for quarterly and year end dates. As a result, it aims to relieve that stress by providing a solution that is easy to use, and it has won the approval bookkeepers and accountants around the world.
So many of us still have a big pile of receipts, that then gets bigger and bigger before we deal with them. And by that time, we have probably lost a few, or forgotten the details of the event, so we cannot recall who we met, or the reason something was bought. With the result that valid expenses do not get fully reclaimed, a situation that can cost a business a major amount of money over a year.
Why not get in touch with us about helping you work through your bookkeeping so that receipts become a problem no more. There are several ways a virtual assistant can help, even from the simple task of taking that pile of receipts from you, matching them against your diary and ensuring they are all allocated correctly. You will be delighted by the time saved, and the cost will probably be substantially covered by the increased amount of expenses you discover that you can claim.