If you are yet to adopt receipt scanning software for your business, you are probably missing out on some key benefits that your peers (who have beat you to it) are already enjoying. To the onlooker, these benefits might look like happier people, fancy-looking client relationship tools, pricing preparedness with regards to tax changes and improved profitability. If your peers – and especially your toughest competitors – are showing such signs of improvement, it could very well be that they have adopted receipt scanning software.
Receipt scanning software does so much more than scan receipts. It extracts data from receipts (and also invoices, bills, bank statements and other source documents) eliminating manual data entry and also sorts and categorises the data. Receipt scanning is in fact a generic name for accounting software that is best known for its receipt scanning abilities but is also capable of invoicing support and analytics.
Use it for: Data entry using receipt scanning
- Benefit from: A more productive team that is also less stressed
Receipt scanning software uses Optical Character Recognition to recognise patterns in data. When the user uploads a scan or a photo of a source document, the software is able to extract text from that picture and generate a digital text entry.
For accounting teams and also for sales and marketing teams that end up with a heavy data entry burden on account of reporting, this could save hours – maybe even days – in a week.
Not only does this free up your team for more work, but also keeps stress levels low because mundane and tedious tasks like manual data entry tend to increase stress levels.
The digital data entry that the software delivers is editable and can be exported (or copied and pasted) to other programs, email and so on. A copy of the source document is also maintained with each entry.
The system can also gather supplier information and order details from your email.
Use it for: Data management using automatic categorisation
- Benefit from: Professionally organised data
The data entries that receipt scanning software creates by extracting data are also automatically sorted for the user’s reference. The system will usually subdivide entries into folders of invoices, receipts, bills and other types of documents and will further arrange these by date.
The user can also go ahead and set up automatic rules for sorting and categorisation. You can sort by supplier, for instance, and might further want to sort suppliers by tax or geography or their specific role in your supply chain.
All your data is easily accessible at a single click. To make things easier still, a search box feature enables users to search for files by keyword.
Use it for: Invoicing support
- Benefit from: Improved cash flow, more professional appearance
How many of your company’s invoices went out after their submission deadlines this fiscal? Of these, how many also resulted in late payments to you? How many invoices were forgotten? How many invoices were rejected because they had errors? How has your cash flow been? If you squirmed a little before you answered any of those, it’s probably because you are still invoicing the traditional way.
Invoicing support comes built-in with some receipt scanning software and has to be purchased as part of an extension with some. Invoicing support means that you get
- Alerts around submission deadlines and when invoices are opened or paid or become overdue
- Customisable templates for invoicing
- Reminders delivered via a client dashboard (which in itself is another amazing perk, allowing your clients to access past invoices, past project work etc)
- Standardisation of invoices
- Error free invoices especially when data is pulled from emails/ purchase orders.
Use it for: Data insights
- Benefit from: AI-enabled actionable business insights
Because receipt scanning software is scanning a whole lot of source documents for you it can deliver highly analytics business insights to you.
Moreover, if linked to your receipt scanning software, data can flow seamlessly from your business bank account to your books – receipt scanning software integrates seamlessly with other accounting suites online. This means that the software has a handle on all your business’ earnings and expenditure, thereby allowing it to give you insights on supply chain efficiency, most lucrative clients and better cash flow.
You also get a customisable dashboard – where a handful of KPIs selected by you can be viewed – that you can access on the go. That’s because you get a partner app that you can use on your smartphone. All the data is live and updated (so long as it has been scanned and uploaded).
Use it for: Keeping data secure
- Benefit from: Advanced, otherwise unaffordable security infrastructure
On-premise data security is extremely cost-intensive and despite its high costs, is still susceptible to loss in natural and manmade disasters. Moreover, very few companies can afford really impregnable security infrastructure and as such, despite what you spend, your valuable data is still vulnerable to theft and spyware.
Data saved to the cloud is safe from natural and manmade disasters and is kept secure through double firewall protection. Solutions providers need to invest in next-level security infrastructure as part of their commitment to their clients.
Use it for: Tax support
- Benefit from: More deductibles claimed; automation of tax computation
No more excuses for tardiness or downright neglect of tax deductibles. Receipt scanning software lets you upload that coffee meeting invoice right then and there, as soon as you get your hands on the slip of paper, because it extracts data within seconds.
The best UK based receipt scanning software will also be able to easily add on the right taxes to your own invoices and recognise taxes in receipts.
Solutions like Dext are even capable of helping you plan pricing better by offering preemptive insights on how soon-to-be-levied taxes stand to eat into your profitability.
Conclusion
Receipt scanning software is a business tool that can enable end-to-end efficiency. Click here to know more and to order a free trial: https://dext.com/en/business-owners/receipt-scanning