How To Banish Paper Receipts For Good

How to banish paper

Like most people it’s safe to say I have a huge disliking of paperwork. Simply looking at stacks of paperwork dotted about makes me feel stressed out, it clutters up my nice clean work surface and is bad for our planet’s beautiful trees.

From a business perspective paperwork is something that many businesses simply accumulate. Part of the reason for this is the requirement from HMRC that you need to keep records for 6 years. This often means storage rooms filled with files stuffed with paperwork and receipts.

As a result of this huge disliking of paper we operate a paperless office here at Bright Horizon HQ – I have to admit each time I’m sent a PDF attachment that asks me to print it off, sign it and scan it – I can’t help but groan with frustration and the wasted time, ink and paper involved.

So how do we do this?

Well we use and swear by a handy Xero add-on called Receipt Bank. Receipt Bank does exactly what the name suggests – it provides a cloud based storage space to store all your receipts and invoices.

But it goes one step further than that and morphs your stacks or receipts into data (including VAT info) that gets pushed through to Xero saving hours of time.

Check out the reasons below why we think Receipt Bank is essential software for any business who wants to save time, space and get rid of paper!

Receipt Bank

No more loosing receipts!

Receipt Bank can be accessed from your internet browser or your phone.  The beauty of this is if you are out at meetings you can simply snap a picture of your coffee receipt from the Receipt Bank App and then woosh, by the time you’re back from your meeting the purchase invoice will be sitting in Xero ready to be reconciled.

This means once the receipt has been uploaded to Xero you can throw it in the bin, make a paper airplane out of it or doodle on it. You don’t need to worry about loosing them anymore.

HMRC are happy

When an invoice from Receipt Bank is sent to Xero it is also attached as a file. This means that if you want to search for an original invoice instead of spending hours trawling through paper files all you have to do is search for the invoice in Xero to view the original receipt scanned from Receipt Bank.

This system will keep HMRC happy as it makes their job nice and easy when paperwork is quick and easy to find and all in one place.

If you ever happened to have an inspection all you would need to do is give HMRC a user log in and they would be able to get all the information they could require.

Big time savings

Every business owner wants to save more time to spend on running their business and wants staff to spend their time as efficiently as possible.

Firstly using an app to take pictures of receipts or simply forwarding an email invoice to Receipt Bank will already save you loads of time. This means you don’t need to manually scan each item and then file it away.

Secondly Receipt Bank can read the invoice amount, VAT amount and date.  It will then publish it to Xero for you either as a draft invoice or as a full invoice. So not only is time saved scanning invoices but it also reduces the time it takes to process the invoice.

So How to you get invoices into Receipt Bank?

  • Using the App – the app uses your camera on your phone to take a picture of the receipt. This is then submitted to processing automatically.
  • Email them across – when you set up your Receipt Bank account you will get a personalized email address for each user. When you receive an invoice from a supplier via email you simply forward the email to your personalized email address.
  • Drag and drop – If you log in online to Receipt Bank you can upload any files you have on your computer. This is handy if you want to upload old scanned invoices for storage.
  • Post – There is a small surcharge for this but you can post your invoices to Receipt Bank – once received they will be processed and stored in your Receipt Bank archive.

Hopefully you get the idea of how this great bit of software can improve your office systems and save you countless hours of time!  If we had to recommend one key software add-on for Xero this would be it. The small cost of the software you earn back easily in the time it takes to efficiency savings alone.

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