Looking for an app that will allow me to calculate employee expenses easily 27 May at 3:04AM in Small Biz & Charities' MoneySaving 7 replies 54 views

RakeshS

Hi all,
I have a property maintenance business, running for the last year. To date, any expenses incurred by my 'employees' (technically they're all self employed) they gather the receipts for, then give them to me on a fortnightly basis, along with a handwritten breakdown of them. I tot these up and pay them to the employees, then manually scan/upload them into my accounting package, Xero (retaining the hard copies.)

Ideally, I'd like an app that they can use to photograph/scan each receipt they receive and will total up all the amount due + photographs of the actual receipts. I'd like to be able to log into this, inspect/download the receipts/amount due, so I cane easily  pay these without all the manual processing.

Does such a system exist (ideally for free, or a low one-off/monthly charge?)

Any guidance on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

R.

Emmia

Have you looked at Expensify?  Unfortunately it's not "free" but i think would give you the functionality you need. 

https://www.expensify.com/pricing

RakeshS

Emmia said:

Have you looked at Expensify?  Unfortunately it's not "free" but i think would give you the functionality you need. 

Thanks Emmia, that looks interesting. £8 per month for each employee adds up though... I was looking at Wave Receipts but not sure it actually does everything I need it to.

If anyone has any other suggestions, I'm all ears 

Savvy_Sue

No idea what it costs but at work we use ReceiptBank which ties into QuickBooks. The way we use it, we each have our own ReciptBank email address to send our photos to, but I wonder if for you it would be simpler for everyone to send the photos to a central email address if that's possible. 

DH uses Spendy to log our payments out, and suspects if he was prepared to pay for it then you could take photos etc, and then possibly use it in the way I described above? 

Savvy_Sue

Been thinking about this a bit more: do your contractors have easy access to Excel? I know I'd prefer to enter totals and breakdowns that way, then email them to you with a photo. If you prepared a basic template, would that work?

RakeshS

Savvy_Sue said:

Been thinking about this a bit more: do your contractors have easy access to Excel? I know I'd prefer to enter totals and breakdowns that way, then email them to you with a photo. If you prepared a basic template, would that work?

One of the guys isn't particularly tech savvy, and even email is a struggle for him, so the idea of him opening a camera-like app and almost "snapping away" will make things easier. Ideally then I could simply connect to his profile, easily check each receipt and approve stuff and have a total to transfer to him.

Savvy_Sue

I'm guessing this is his personal phone? If it was a work phone, I'd suggest setting the photo storage option to be somewhere you could see, and then possibly giving him a template form to fill in by hand which he could also snap. You'd still have to do some manual work, but what you're inputting might be better organised. 

DH says his app doesn't give the photo option, but as he said, you're actually asking a lot of any app: it takes a photo, uses OCR to distinguish figures, and (certainly with ReceiptBank) you've got to do some manual input to break it down. I wonder if this particular chap would struggle with an app if he had to do text input - so I would give some thought to ways of improving what you get. 

Grumpy_chap

If everyone who works for you is self-employed, why are you managing their expenses?
Get then to manage their own expenses and submit one monthly invoice for the labour and all other costs.