Receipt management is a real drag for almost everyone, bookkeepers and their clients included.
However, it’s pretty important for both parties. You must keep an organized, complete record of receipts across your roster of clients to keep them compliant.
And, receipt management is core to helping you develop an informed understanding of client businesses so that you can move into a valued, trusted, and lasting advisor role.
If you’re like the majority of firms looking to build consultative client relationships that yield more revenue for less busy work — more on this trend later — it’s time to dive into how receipt management can help you get there.
Receipt management is of course critical to keeping track of client expenses for basic compliance and tax purposes.
However, have you ever thought about how important it also becomes when you want to move into an advisory role with your clients? Understanding business spending and income is core to how accountants help their clients with a variety of high-value services.
That last point is a huge one.
It may be more accurate to say that advisory services aren’t the future of accounting — they’re nearly the status quo.
A survey of small to mid-sized global firms in 2023 found that an impressive 65% offer either only advisory services or a mix of advisory and compliance work. And 57% are aiming to provide even more consultative services.
What’s the point?
Exposure to new (and often bigger) clients, increased fees for more deep work, and overall revenue growth.
However, you may not be able to dive as deep as you need into strategic thinking if you’re still trying to manage receipts manually.
Here’s why.
Receipt management can be a headache for both clients and accountants.
As we all know, physical receipts are prone to getting lost — especially if they’re not filed away immediately. And even when they are accounted for, they can degrade over time and become illegible by the time they’re needed.
For clients, keeping track of the different types of receipts that come with running a business can be daunting. And it can be difficult for accountants and bookkeepers to know exactly what to ask clients for to make sure they have everything. Ideally, you would have a receipt for every sale as well as expenses. These could include:
Misplaced receipts don’t just make for difficult inventory management, an inaccurate balance sheet, financial discrepancies that are hard to justify in the case of an audit, and less-informed decision-making for clients. Poor records also mean an overwhelming tax season for you and for clients who have a disorganized (or no) receipt management strategy.
Complete and organized receipt records makes filing taxes faster and easier and may even help with tax savings, because they serve as a reminder of deductible expenses and any tax credits clients may be eligible to claim. Receipts are a good idea everywhere, but especially in Canada where the Canada Revenue Agency is especially tough on people who try to deduct business expenses without a receipt proving the purchase.
So, what’s a firm to do to spend less time wrangling receipts and more time offering big-budget, strategic accounting advice?
That’s next.
There is a solution for effectively tracking and managing receipts so that you have all the data you need to serve as a valuable accounting and advisory partner for your clients.
Modern receipt management software makes it easy to track, save, and organize client receipts digitally. This prevents lost receipts for clients and for you — so you have the resources necessary to keep good books, help clients remain tax compliant, and even become a trustworth advisory partner in risk management, budgeting, forecasting, and deeper planning and coaching.
New to receipt management? Once you’re ready to invest, put these key capabilities on your shopping list to make sure the software you choose is up to snuff:
Simple receipt upload: Critically, clients of course need to be able to send you receipts. Most modern software will let them digitize receipts by scanning them or snapping a photo. It’s paramount that this process has as few steps as possible, or clients will avoid it and receipts will pile up and get lost.
Keeper’s practice management software features uncomplicated receipt management (in beta). Clients can use it to upload files into your branded Client Portal or simply email or text them to your firm, which will cause them to automatically populate in your Keeper client uploads inbox.
Fast scanning: Receipt management software has to read uploaded receipts so that it can understand the data and help you categorize each transaction. When you have even a handful of clients, you want this process to be as quick as possible. With Keeper, it takes just a matter of seconds.
Automated, smart processing and posting: Attaching the right vendors, dates, categories, locations, and other details to each transaction can be a full time job. So can lining up your client ledger with the transactions you just added, making it important to look for software that helps with this. Keeper uses AI, transaction history, and rules that you yourself create to help you process, match, and post accurate yet fast transactions.
Integration with your other accounting tools: OK, now you get to go enter all that same information into QuickBooks! Well, unless you’re using Keeper. Once a transaction is posted, you’ll see a button appear that you can use to open it right inside of QuickBooks. No need to duplicate work or get slowed down switching between workplace apps constantly. (Support for Xero coming soon!)
Open communication: Questions often arise during this process. You could start a new email thread, send a text with little context, or embark upon a never-ending phone call with that one chatty client. Or, you could just use Keeper and post a question inside the accounting portal you and your client are already using to ensure you get a timely, relevant answer.
Ease of use: You don’t want to take the time to teach clients — or your employees — yet another system (nor do you want to pay for it). In fact, 88% of top-performing client advisory services (CAS) firms use just three or fewer general ledger (G/L) software programs. They know it’s more efficient, more affordable, and better for your service offerings to stick to just a few platforms that deliver on all of your needs.
This may keep you away from adopting a simple receipt tracking tool. However, Keeper receipt management is integrated right into the Client Portal where you’re already working and communicating every day, so your clients and team already know how to use it and won’t even have to leave the bookkeeping app to access it.
Security: Data security is of course key in a receipt manager that’s going to have access to all kinds of client data. Since Keeper is already an established accounting platform and not a free-standing receipt tracking app, we take security seriously and have various systems in place to keep data protected and private.
Sure, receipt management is a bit of necessary evil in accounting — but it can also be used to your strategic advantage.
By embracing receipt organization strategies as well as smart receipt management tooling that’s already integrated into modern bookkeeping software, you can save time on receipt wrestling and spend more of it building the advisory relationship today’s clients have come to crave.
