Keeping track of receipts is a bigger challenge than it should be when managing business expenses. Whether you’re out of the office and incurring expenses, or in the office and processing them – paper receipts can make life tricky. Not to mention frustrating.
Receipts are prone to being damaged or thrown away by accident. They’re also easy to lose amongst piles of paperwork. We’ve all been there! Thankfully, receipt scanning is an easy way to convert paper receipts into digital documents. And when you do this within an expense app, there are other benefits as well.
In this blog post, we take a look at receipt scanning and share an easy way to scan receipts using the OCR scanner inside Findity’s expense app.
What is a receipt scanner?
A receipt scanner is a device which captures receipts using optical character recognition (OCR). The main difference between an OCR scanner and a flatbed scanner or photo is that it doesn’t just create a digital image. Instead, it uses software to extract information from the receipt, such as currency and amounts. In some countries, like in the UK, the digital version can replace the paper receipt as a legal basis used for accounting.
There are physical devices on the market that will do this for you, but a far simpler solution is to use your smartphone camera via an expense app. Simply snap a photo of the receipt from the app. The software intelligently reads the information and collects the data from it.
Why use an expense app?
Let’s say you’ve been on a business trip, and managed to keep hold of all your receipts. Firstly, congratulations! There are no receipts hiding in a pocket or bag, and you haven’t mistakenly thrown them out with other pieces of waste paper.
Now it’s time to send all your expenses – receipts, mileage, per diem and more – for approval, posting in accounting, and, finally, reimbursement. Before you do, you need to record them somewhere. Perhaps your company provides a form to fill out. Maybe it’s a spreadsheet.
Whichever it is, you have to manually enter the amounts. Tired, and no doubt bored from this time-consuming data entry, you make a mistake. That mistake has just cost your employer around $52 to correct, and about an average of 18 minutes to put right.
If your company is more digitally mature, it might provide an old-fashioned scanner. Imagine you’ve got 10 receipts to process. You’ve now got to scan each receipt, and you still need to manually record the details somewhere.
Not so, with an expense app.
Using an OCR scanner from within an expense app means you can record and submit expenses faster and more accurately than any kind of manual method. You can also do it on the fly, wherever you are. Here’s how.
Receipt scanning from Findity
Our OCR scanner goes beyond simply scanning a receipt. It collects all the relevant data from your receipts: language, expense category, currency, tax, amount and so on. Should you spot an error? No need to panic. Simply amend the data before saving and sending. Scanned a receipt already? The app gives you a warning to avoid duplicating expenses.
The beauty of using the app on a mobile device is that anyone can scan and save the data, from accountants in the office to employees – wherever they are. Companies no longer need to rely on a single device held by an accountant or a payroll team to scan receipts.
Receipt scanning with Findity is instant. It can be done wherever you are, providing fast, accessible data capture that provides accurate and compliant data to your accounting and payroll systems.
Findity is one place for all your expenses. Receipt scanning is just one feature. Discover more.
