We’re finding one of the simplest and most effective processes for managing supplier payments and paper work is to use the online receipt storage solution Shoeboxed. Shoeboxed makes the sometimes painful discipline of keeping receipts and invoices a lot quicker and easier, and is great later down the line with bookkeeping, accounting and payment processes.
How shoeboxed works:
• send invoices to shoeboxed by email, scan & upload, post, or with a smart phone camera and app
• shoeboxed use optical character recognition scanning and human-verification to extract key data including the supplier name, date, amount, GST and payment method
• invoice images and their data are stored securely in the cloud, and can be searched, sorted, and filtered by any of the fields, and exported in lots of different formats (including flat PDFs with each image in the search range, and excel tables)
Shoeboxed charge (very cost effectively) for scanning and data entry rather than ongoing storage, which is great. Once documents are in there, they are safe forever in this ATO endorsed service. You can also export the entire database and images at any time if you wanted to keep a local copy.
The real benefit comes with managing and paying the invoices. They can be imported into accounting and bookkeeping software with no further data entry required. Once there, a business’ payables can be viewed and reported on properly, and invoices paid efficiently in bulk.
We are saving ourselves and clients lots of bookkeeping time with these processes, and really liking being able to see payables more quickly and accurately. In each case there are process tweaks needed to deal with each business’ quirks, but shoeboxed usually has enough functionality to handle it, and they are improving all the time. There support team in Sydney is great too.
