Automation of Bills and Receipts

6/1/2020

With today’s automation tools it is quick and easy to capture data from receipts, bills, invoices and bank statements. Applications like Auto Entry, Hub Doc, and Receipt Bank provide a low-cost system to save significant time in processing your organization’s bills and receipts.

Using Receipt Bank as an example, let’s take a closer look at what these services can do for your organization.

RESOURCE: Receipt Bank Submission Methods

Submitting Items

The first step is getting supporting documents to process receipts, bills, and expense reports. Receipt Bank provides several ways to do this, including snapping a picture with your smartphone, emailing, scanning, using a drobox folder, or automatic fetching.

Fetching will automatically login to supplier sites and download your receipts for you. Receipt Bank checks authorized suppliers weekly. Fetching frees you from having to visit supplier websites, logging in, finding the document and downloading it. Check out the extensive list of currently supported suppliers at https://help.receipt-bank.com.

Processing

Once Receipt Bank receives the bill or receipt, it uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to extract key fields from the document. These fields include vendor, date, total, taxes, and the payment method if applicable.

With all the information extracted by Receipt Bank, you simply input a category for the expense. If it is a frequent vendor, you can configure supplier rules, including the category, default tax, and payment method.

Posting and Summarizing

With the details completed, you can now add the invoice to an expense report, post it directly to your online accounting program (including QuickBooks, Sage Accounting, Xero, and others), or download the details as a PDF or CSV file.

If you are not using an online accounting program, you can use the CSV file to import the transactions or create a summary for posting into your accounting system.

Improved Workflow and Time Savings

The result of using one of these automation tools is:

Bills and receipts are quickly captured and processed
Multiple supplier documents are automatically downloaded and processed
No more time spent sorting and filing invoices and receipts

Quick and easy access to any document stored
Secure archival of documents

I recommend giving automation a try for yourself. I have found the improved workflow and time savings are significant. Use the following links to sign up for a free trial.

Receipt Bank
Auto Entry
HubDoc

Ward Blatch

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Authors

Ward Blatch
Ward provides consulting and training services as the Managing Director of K2E Canada Inc. He joined K2E Canada in 2005 and is responsible for the Canadian operations of this international consulting group, which provides professional development technology education for accountants across Canada and the US. Ward lives in rural Nova Scotia and can be reached at ward@k2e.ca.

Tommy Stephens
Tommy is one of the shareholders in K2 Enterprises, affiliating with the Firm in 2003 and joining as a shareholder in 2017. At K2, Tommy focuses on creating and delivering content and is responsible for many of the Firm's management and marketing functions. Tommy resides in the metro Atlanta area. You may reach him at tommy@k2e.com.

Randy Johnson
Randy is a nationally recognized educator, consultant, and writer with over 40 years experience in Strategic Technology Planning, Accounting Software Selection, Paperless, Systems and Network Integration, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning, Business Development and Management, Process Engineering and outsourced managed services. Randy can be reached at randy@k2e.com

Bernie Smith
Bernie coaches businesses to develop meaningful KPIs and present their management information in the clearest possible way to support good decision making. As the owner of Made to Measure KPIs, he has worked with major organisations including HSBC, Airbus, UBS, Barclays, Credit Suisse, Lloyds and many more.

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