The business benefits of receipt apps. Businesses incur a variety of expenses every day. In some cases, employees end up paying for these expenses themselves. Employees are usually reimbursed at the end of each month. In order to receive reimbursement, they must submit expense reports along with scanned, actual or photocopied receipts. Most companies struggle with the reimbursement process due to old archaic paper systems, whereby many mistakes can be made. In more recent times with the introduction of receipt apps the credit card expense management process has become much simpler, leaving the financial department headache free.
The business benefits of receipt apps: what are they?
The business benefits of receipt apps begins with effective technology. A receipt scanner app, can assist your employees with take pictures of receipts directly from their smartphones. Organisations are using receipt scanners equipped with OCR (optical character recognition) software to avoid a lot of paperwork for business expenses.
By reading text content from scanned documents or images, it converts it into machine-readable information. This allows employees to submit expenses directly and get reimbursed much more quickly.
Is your business in need of a receipt scanning app?
In order to determine whether your organisation needs a receipt scanner app, you should examine how frequently and how complex your reimbursement process is. Look at previous data regarding business expenses and employee involvement in it. Find out whether your employees think it will benefit them.
It is best to check with the finance team, as they deal with reimbursements and expenses on a daily basis. By reducing the amount of manual paperwork involved with reimbursement and expense reporting, the app can make it easier for all your employees.
It is also important to keep in mind that receipt apps for business aren’t the only features these apps have. They can also help you manage your budget.
Apps for scanning receipts have many benefits
It takes a lot of time and effort for employees as well as your finance department to settle reimbursements using the traditional methods. If an employee loses their receipt, they will have a hard time claiming a reimbursement. The process also is prone to many errors.
With a receipt scanner app, your employees can immediately input receipt data digitally. The optical character recognition software minimises human errors that might occur when entering data manually from receipts.
Also, with digital receipts, your finance team will no longer need to remind employees to submit their claims.
What are the benefits of receipt scanning for expense management?
For the longest time, the way expenses were managed within an organisation was considered a normal procedure only because there was no alternative. It was the norm that employees bought something on behalf of the company, collected the receipt, held onto it until the end of the month, filed their expense report along with the receipt, and waited to receive reimbursement.
In fact, printing text from a computer is quite simple, but it’s not so easy to transform physical images or documents that contain text into readable text. With the advancement of OCR technology over the years, receipt scanner apps are now available for businesses that can do that. As optical character recognition software has evolved, it has become capable of identifying text, even in different fonts, by recognising patterns pixel by pixel.
What is the process of scanning receipts with an app?
- An employee incurs a business expense out of their own pocket.
- The receipt for this expense is collected.
- The receipt is then photographed through the Crunchr app and your employee can then create a ‘New Expense’.
- Using OCR software, the app will detect and collect valuable information from the receipt, such as the amount spent, the vendor’s name, etc.
- Your company’s admin can review this information and either accept, reject, or request more information regarding the expense to proceed with reimbursement.
Receipt scanning apps: 6 reasons to use them
Other benefits of receipt apps are as follows:
Extraction of data using advanced technology
A receipt scanner app uses advanced OCR technology to automatically read receipts and extract data into the appropriate fields for filling an expense form. The optical character recognition feature makes it unlikely that a member of the finance team will misread expense amounts when processing reimbursements. By scanning your receipts and saving them to a secure cloud service you will avoid faded receipts.
In addition to the employee checking that the right amount was entered when creating the expense, the finance member who approves it can double-check the amount in the picture of the receipt with the amount requested, at the click of a button.
Storage that is unlimited
The biggest challenge with physical receipts and expense reports is storing them safely until the end of the month. Paper receipts are often very small and can become faded or easily lost.
Since receipts are digitally stored and can easily be accessed at any time, the chances of losing them become almost zero with a receipt scanner for business. Additionally, you can store a copy of the receipt’s picture locally on your phone as well as on the receipt app’s cloud servers.
Security enhancements
Receipts and expense reports stored in your office are always at risk of theft and fire. You cannot control these things.
If you want to avoid this all together, you should adopt the digital way and use receipt scanner apps. In the event of a data loss, many of these apps offer data backup services for enhanced security and protection. As opposed to physical files, which get lost or fade and also take up a lot of space, digital data is much easier to protect and much cheaper.
Efficacy
The efficiency of your employees and the finance department will improve once your business adopts a receipt scanner app.
This allows employees to easily file expenses on the run without worrying about where and how to safely store receipts until the end of the month.
It becomes extremely easy for the finance department to manage all expenses through a single platform without having to reconcile each expense with the individual.
It saves both parties a great deal of time, which can be put to better use.
User-friendly
Receipt scanner apps are simple to use for business expenses. There is a minimal learning curve for your employees. In fact with Apps like Crunchr they can be set up in seconds.
With automatic receipt capture, employees have an even easier time using the system. When it comes to accessing data, we’re sure your finance team will agree that typing and searching for a particular expense within the app is way easier than going through a pile of paper receipts.
As mentioned earlier, receipt scanner apps can do this because of their advanced technology. With Crunchr employees can set different ATO style categories for every expense and can even create their own.
Reports on expenses
Usually, receipt scanning apps come with other useful features like the ability to integrate directly with accounting software. The Crunchr app can also integrate with custom accounting software packages, making end of month a breeze.
With this feature included in the app, your finance team can directly export all expense reports to your ledgers for bookkeeping. This capability can make or break a deal for any organisation.
On the app, receipts are scanned as follows:
- You can create a new claim on the Crunchr mobile app.
- This new claim requires your employee to take a picture of the receipt. The OCR software in the app will read and interpret the data and fill out the necessary information.
- The company financial team can approve the expense claim.
Find the best receipt scanning app for your business
For many of Crunchr’s customers, a receipt scanner is an important part of the financial expense management processes.
You can download the Crunchr app from either the Google Play Store for Android or the AppStore for iOS. It has many different features, including a receipt scanner.
