Managing all your expenses and receipts, especially when you are on the go, requires strategic planning and help from apps like accounting software, receipt scanning software, and more. By using receipt scanners, you ensure that all your expenses are organised and tracked, which helps you march into the tax season equipped to claim all the tax deductions that you qualify for.
Receipt scanning software has helped businesses across different industries simplify expense tracking and ensure no mismanagement of receipts occurs. Whether you are using a receipt scanner to manage your freelancing receipts or to organise all of your business receipts and invoices – here are some ways you can get the most out of your receipt scanning software!
Process Financial Data Immediately
Generally, without a receipt scanner software, you would take the physical receipts, store them safely in one place, and select one particular day for going through them and tracking them. However, with scanning software, since you get the advantage of uploading information on the fly, you should make it a habit of taking a photo of each receipt as soon as you get it so that you don’t need to worry about receipts piling up. In doing so, you will be simplifying many of your future tasks, as you will never have to deal with an unmanageable heap of financial documents.
Export Expenses to Accounting Receipt Software
Receipt scanning software comes with the ability to export all your expenses and receipts stored digitally to the accounting system of your choice. By linking the expenses and receipts to significant accounting and expense tracking tools like Dext etc., your receipt scanning software will automatically sync all the financial details to the accounting system, which will help you during the bookkeeping process. Having everything available at your fingertips is a must, especially as your organisation starts to expand.
Match Receipt with Transactions
Manually matching each receipt with a transaction on the bank statement can be a real cumbersome and tedious task. Luckily, you can directly connect the receipt scanners with your bank account with receipt scanning software to quickly match all transactions to receipts. Alternatively, you can also just take a picture of the receipt, and the application will do the rest. Both these ways save a lot of time and hassle on your end and make sure that your bookkeeping experience is smooth and easy.
Add Metadata to Receipt
Adding metadata – information like projects, location information, expense category, etc. – to receipts is an excellent way of organising them and making them easily searchable. If, at a later date, you need to go over the expenses incurred on a particular project, or client, simply look up the relevant metadata, and all the information will be right there at your fingertips!
Create Comprehensive Expense Reports
With receipt scanning software, you can create extensive expense reports using easy-to-understand visualisations. These reports come in extremely handy, especially when you need to convey your financial information to other people from your team, like the stakeholders and such. It is important to note that some scanning software might need to be integrated into the accounting system for this feature to work. Whatever be the case, the importance of creating expense reports simply cannot be overstated!
Collect Invaluable Customer Data
From the point of view of “customer retention”, receipt scanning software makes it very easy for customers to share their data with the brand. In return, brands can use this data to offer highly personalised shopping experiences during their entire journey. Hence, not only does it provide convenience to the customers but customer data is also extremely valuable to the brand itself as the way they use this data can help the entire organization as a whole.
Save Time, Space, and Reduce Clutter
Scan all the receipts promptly to avoid all the potential clutter and save time as well as space. By doing that, you will provide yourself with a lot more mental bandwidth to focus on tasks that would fuel business growth. Further, this will also make your environment and office setting cleaner and less messy, improving your workspace, as well as allowing you to require fewer filing cabinets and storage units.
There you have it!
Receipt scanning software has been an absolute boon for organisations of all shapes and sizes. Taking care of one of the most critical yet cumbersome tasks – i.e., tracking, storing, and managing receipts – receipt scanners provide you with all the time and mental space you need to focus on bigger challenges and reach closer to achieving business goals. Just follow the tips mentioned above, and you will be on your way to getting the most out of your receipt scanning software every time you put it to use!