Keeping track of receipts is a bigger challenge than it should be when managing business expenses. Whether out of the office and incurring expenses or in the office and processing them – paper receipts can make life tricky. Not to mention frustrating.
Receipts are prone to being damaged or thrown away by accident. They’re also easy to lose amongst piles of paperwork. However, with technology provided by Findity, your customers can easily convert paper receipts into digital documents, simplifying the whole expense management process.
In this blog post, we take a look at receipt scanning and explore how integrating Findity’s receipt scanning technology can transform expense management for your clients.
What is a receipt scanner?
A receipt scanner is a device that captures receipts using optical character recognition (OCR). The strength of an OCR scanner, compared to a flatbed scanner or a simple photo, is that it doesn’t just create a digital image. Instead, it uses software to extract key information from the receipt, such as currency and amounts. In some countries, like the UK, the digital version can replace the paper receipt as a legal basis used for accounting.
There are physical devices available on the market that will do this. However, incorporating Findity’s OCR technology into your own app, or as a white-label expense management solution, offers a simpler and more efficient solution for your customers.
Why use an expense app?
Imagine your clients have returned from a business trip, having successfully kept all their receipts. Firstly, congratulations to them! No receipt has been lost in the shuffle of travel, hiding in a pocket or bag, or mistakenly thrown out with other pieces of waste paper.
Now it’s time to send all expenses – receipts, mileage, per diem, and more – for approval, posting in accounting, and, finally, reimbursement. Before they do, they need to record them somewhere. Perhaps the company provides a form to fill out. Maybe it’s a spreadsheet.
Whichever it is, they have to manually enter the amounts. Tired, and no doubt bored from this time-consuming data entry, they make a mistake. That mistake has just cost their employer around $52 to correct, and about an average of 18 minutes to put right.
If the company is more digitally mature, it might provide an old-fashioned scanner. Imagine having 10 receipts to process. Each receipt has to be scanned, and the details still need to be manually recorded somewhere.
Not so, with an expense app.
Using an OCR scanner from within an expense app means they can record and submit expenses faster and more accurately than with any manual method. They can also do it on the fly, wherever they are. Here’s how.
Receipt scanning powered by Findity's technology
An OCR scanner powered by Findity’s technology goes beyond simply scanning a receipt. It collects all the relevant data from the receipts: language, expense category, currency, tax, amount, and so on. Should an error be spotted? No need to panic. Simply amend the data before saving and sending. Scanned a receipt already? The app gives a warning to avoid duplicating expenses.
The beauty of using an app on a mobile device is that anyone can scan and save the data, from accountants in the office to employees – wherever they are. Companies no longer need to rely on a single device held by an accountant or a payroll team to scan receipts.
Receipt scanning with Findity's technology is instant. It can be done anywhere, providing a fast and accessible way to capture data that provides accurate and compliant data to accounting and payroll systems.
Findity transforms expense management. Beyond receipt scanning, it's a comprehensive solution for your customers' needs. Discover more.
