We're aware that some users are experiencing technical issues which the team are working to resolve. See the Community Noticeboard for more info. Thank you for your patience.
📨 Have you signed up to the Forum's new Email Digest yet? Get a selection of trending threads sent straight to your inbox daily, weekly or monthly!

Looking for an app that will allow me to calculate employee expenses easily

Options
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.

Comments

  • Emmia
    Emmia Posts: 5,573 Forumite
    Fifth Anniversary 1,000 Posts Photogenic Name Dropper
    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
    RakeshS Posts: 30 Forumite
    Fifth Anniversary 10 Posts Photogenic
    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
    Savvy_Sue Posts: 47,298 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper
    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? 
    Signature removed for peace of mind
  • Savvy_Sue
    Savvy_Sue Posts: 47,298 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper
    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?
    Signature removed for peace of mind
  • RakeshS
    RakeshS Posts: 30 Forumite
    Fifth Anniversary 10 Posts Photogenic
    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
    Savvy_Sue Posts: 47,298 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper
    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. 
    Signature removed for peace of mind
  • Grumpy_chap
    Grumpy_chap Posts: 18,215 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper Combo Breaker
    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.
Meet your Ambassadors

🚀 Getting Started

Hi new member!

Our Getting Started Guide will help you get the most out of the Forum

Categories

  • All Categories
  • 350.8K Banking & Borrowing
  • 253K Reduce Debt & Boost Income
  • 453.5K Spending & Discounts
  • 243.8K Work, Benefits & Business
  • 598.6K Mortgages, Homes & Bills
  • 176.8K Life & Family
  • 257K Travel & Transport
  • 1.5M Hobbies & Leisure
  • 16.1K Discuss & Feedback
  • 37.6K Read-Only Boards

Is this how you want to be seen?

We see you are using a default avatar. It takes only a few seconds to pick a picture.