Automation of Bills and Receipts - A Followup

In our previous post, we discussed using one of the online automation tools to process your bills and receipts. For many who are not using an online accounting solution, the advantages appeared limited. In this post, we will cover the benefits these tools, like Receipt Bank, bring to any business.

Organization and Filing

The efficiencies gained from these services include:

• Time previously required to file, archive, and destroy bills and receipts
• Additional office space made available by the elimination of filing cabinets
• Quick access to any invoice or receipt
• Automatic extraction of the vendor, date, invoice number, amount, and taxes to speed up posting
• Automatic account allocation of expenses

The quick access to any expense document is possible by a search based on the amount, date, supplier, payment method, category, or any combination of these variables.

The need to go to the vendor site, log in, download, and process the invoice is automatic with the tool fetching recurring invoices from a long list of supported vendors. Check out the full listing for Receipt Bank at https://help.receipt-bank.com/hc/en-us/articles/360005754174-List-of-Suppliers-for-Invoice-Fetch

Transaction Summary

Now that you have all of your invoices and receipts automatically saved and the data extracted, you can export the critical information. Using Receipt Bank as an example, filter the list of documents in the archive and select the receipts and invoices to export. 

Figure 1 - Select Items to Export

Now click export, select the format from the drop-down list, and click Generate.

Figure 2 - Select CSV Format from the drop-down list

Export your items using the various options to find the CSV format that works best for you. For this example, we used the Receipt Bank Default.

Save the exported CSV file in a folder with the other exports from previous days, weeks or months.

Summarizing with Excel

With all the export files in a single folder, you can now use Excel’s get data from folder feature to combine the results into a single table or pivot table.

Get Data from Folder is found in the data ribbon under Get Data > From File > From Folder. The panel that opens requires you to complete the folder path.

Figure 3 - Get Data Folder

With the folder path completed, click OK and the list of files will be displayed, now click combine.

Figure 4 - Review the list and click Combine & Load

The next screen provides a sample from the First File, click OK. The data is now in a single table in Excel.

Figure 5 - Combined Data

With the next export file added to the folder, a right-click on the table and selecting refresh will cause Excel to rerun the query and update the table to include the new data.

A summary of the receipts using the sumifs function or a pivot table can be the basis of your accounting entry. 

Figure 6 - Summary of Expenses

Export the receipts to a PDF as a backup for the entry.

Summary

It is time to look at automation to extract data from your receipts and bills. Whether you connect to online accounting, export and summarize for posting or post each entry in your accounting system manually, the time savings are significant.

To try Receipt Bank free for 30 days go to Receipt Bank to sign up. Other options include Auto Entry and HubDoc .

Ward Blatch, CPA CA