Photograph the receipt now, forget the shoebox forever
Every quarter the same ritual: a carrier bag of faded receipts tipped onto a desk, and someone trying to work out what a £14 petrol station receipt from March was for.
Where it hurts
Receipts pile up in the van door pocket, in coat pockets, in the bottom of a bag. Thermal ones fade to blank by the time anyone looks. Some never make it back at all, which means VAT you paid and can't reclaim.
Your bookkeeper or accountant spends the run-up to every deadline chasing you for the missing ones, and you spend an evening you resent trying to reconstruct three months of spending from a card statement.
It's not that the system is complicated. It's that there is no system, just a shoebox and good intentions.
What I'd build
I'd get you onto Dext (or the receipt capture that's built into your accounts package) and set it up so the moment you're handed a receipt you photograph it and it's gone: read, categorised and filed against the right supplier. Fuel receipts, materials, the lot. It pushes straight through to Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent or Sage so your bookkeeper works from clean data instead of a carrier bag. I'll set up the categories and the forwarding rules so email receipts get pulled in automatically too, and show your team the two-second habit that keeps it working.
What changes
- Every receipt captured the moment you get it, before it fades
- VAT you paid actually reclaimed, not lost in a pocket
- Your bookkeeper stops chasing and works from clean records
- No more reconstructing a quarter from a card statement
Related fixes
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