You heard me right when I say effortless bookkeeping! I have been using Receipt Bank, an awesome data extraction application that makes bookkeeping efficient. The tool uses optical character recognition to extract data such as the supplier name, date, amount, and sales tax. The beauty is all you need to do is snap a picture on your smartphone and send it through the application. PDFs are also accepted by the application. Other ways of getting the image into Receipt Bank include emailing the file to your very own receipt bank email account or uploading to their website.

After Receipt Bank extracts the data you can code the receipt to the proper account and publish it to your cloud accounting software. Xero integrates with Receipt Bank which makes my practice’s accounting very easy. Bank statement lines are matched up with receipts that I have published which makes the reconciliation process quite painless.

Receipt Bank can be used as a stand-alone application, especially if you are not invoicing customers and all you need to do is track expenses. I had a client that is commissioned so all we needed to do was capture all of their expenses. Receipt Bank can generate an expense report in CSV format. It will total all of the expenses by category and even show the HST that was paid.

One last cool feature that I have used Receipt Bank for is bank statement extraction. I had a situation where a client did not have their bank feeds set-up in Xero and I wanted to start getting data into the program while they got their online banking set-up as their HST deadline was approaching. I simply scanned their bank statements and emailed them and within 2 business days I had a CSV file that was ready to be imported directly into Xero.