Physical hardware to support expenses: scanners, network scanners, handheld scanners...

Question asked by Daniel Dainty 10 years ago

What does everybody use to deal with the mammoth task of scanning in a quarter's worth of receipts and tagging everything?

I've been looking at getting a network scanner (pricey) or a flatbed (clunky) or a sheet-feed (will it take receipts?) or a little hand-held thing (possibly...) but not sure what to do.

Does anyone else have any experience of this?

Thanks in advance,

Daniel

10 Replies

Hello Daniel,

You should be able to scan to the API email directly onto your Clear Books account. That will allow you to have the scans ready for attachment.

The business client can do this if they wish to as well. To find the email, go to Settings > Organisation > Details and then click on API on the right. There will be an email to use to send your scans to.

The mobile app will also be having this feature so the client can do the expenses directly when they are out and attach the file at the same time reducing the need to stack up those receipts.

If these are not okay, I do recommend Receipt Bank as it has more functions when compared to the Keebo integration we have.

Vanish

PS Kevin, thank as always.

Wow. £20 a month for the cheapest plan? When I get busier I'll consider it, but for now that'd buy me a Doxie Go scanner or something, twice a year.

Nice link though, thanks.

I don't use them myself as little need but some of my paper heavy clients do.

With regards to scanning, I just use an Epson all-in-one flatbed but make sure I do it monthly instead of quarterly. Tbh most of most invoices are online these days anyway so I just save down a copy, prob only 10-20 paper ones a month at most.

When you say tagging, what do you mean exactly?

Tagging = the whole "this is for the wholesaler renewal, this is for a coffee for Starbucks, this is for the storage bins I bought from Ikea" and so on. Or at least doing OCR on it and making it searchable.

I'm struggling with getting all my receipts scanned and attached to clearbooks (the delay between me doing the scan and emailing it to the special address, and it appearing on the console for me to attach, is particularly irritating) and really just wanted to know what everyone else does.

I'm going to have a look at the other integrations though; thanks for pointing me in that direction.

(I will still need to buy a scanner though!)

Presumably you're already creating the relevant bills in Clear Books in the first place? If so, do you REALLY need to tag anything?

I know it's clever bla bla and i'm all for good tech but how often do you need to review a receipt in a time critical manner? Why not just bulk scan to a single PDF once a month, save the file to Dropbox or whatever and if there comes a point when you have to search for something you'll just have to scroll through a few pages before finding it.

I bet overall you'd save bundles of time just doing it that way.

Scanning to a single PDF is the problem at the moment. At the moment this is how I do my expenses:

file

And then I just keep all the receipts for that month's claim in a file in the office.

The emailing of receipts I think is a good thing to link the receipt to the entity, so you don't have to go rummaging through files/folders. Although obviously that is what I would have to do at the moment (and yes, it works, but it's shelf space and admin that I'd like to do away with).

This is just for crappy expense receipts; yes, the proper invoices and bills get created the normal way in CB.

Easier to rummage through one PDF a month containing all receipts than that physical folder on your shelf though.

Which takes me back to my first question...

file

...what do you use for scanning this lot in?

(I have a feeling this is going to be a circular question so I won't hold it against you if you don't reply)

I've just found keebo.com and it integrates with CB too, except their plan for the same volume of receipts is 25% that of receipt-bank so I'm going to give that a try.

Thanks for your company :)

I like replying!! ;-)

Keebo was going to be my other suggestion, just couldn't couldn't remember their exact name.

Hope it goes well...

Hello Daniel,

You should be able to scan to the API email directly onto your Clear Books account. That will allow you to have the scans ready for attachment.

The business client can do this if they wish to as well. To find the email, go to Settings > Organisation > Details and then click on API on the right. There will be an email to use to send your scans to.

The mobile app will also be having this feature so the client can do the expenses directly when they are out and attach the file at the same time reducing the need to stack up those receipts.

If these are not okay, I do recommend Receipt Bank as it has more functions when compared to the Keebo integration we have.

Vanish

PS Kevin, thank as always.

Reply to this question

Attach images by dragging and dropping or upload
 

Your comments will be public and can be answered by anyone in the Clear Books community.

Find out what we do and who we are