Top Tips For Managing Receipts

Keeping a record of all your receipts and expenses while operating a small business can be a challenge for anyone, especially if you don’t have much bookkeeping experience,

When other business decisions such as stock supplies, ensuring you have everything for the next day of business or job order, recalling where you put your receipts might be the last thing on your mind. Not to mention dealing with human resource issues if you have staff.

Sitting at a desk to record all your expenses and sort out all your receipts can seem like a time-consuming task best left for another day. However, by not taking the time to sort your receipts and record your expenses on a regular basis can lead to  many missing receipts. If these were cash purchases, you now have no record of the money spent and can no longer claim either the GST or the expense. This could make a big difference at the end of financial year.

In this post, we share our top tips for managing receipts to help make sure you never miss out on claiming a deduction again.

• Keep Personal and Business accounts separate. Pay all business expenses out of your business account. If you don’t have sufficient funds in your business account, transfer personal funds into your business account before paying for the expense, so that it’s not confusing later.

• Enlist the help of a certified bookkeeper. If you already use cloud bookkeeping software, like Xero, that’s great but just by having this software doesn’t take care of everything. Using the phone apps to take photos of receipts and upload is a great way to keep track of these expenses.  To ensure that your online accounting system is truly automated, a Xero certified bookkeeper like Shellys Bookkeeping can help set it all up for you such as connecting your bank feeds, creating rules and then recommending and connecting you to valuable addon’s like Dext to take truly advantage of all a cloud accounting software like Xero can offer. Setting up automation in your business certainly saves you time, but it also helps make ATO compliance simple.  

• Avoid cash when possible. Cash is hard to track, easy to spend and almost impossible to reconcile with receipts. Try to stick with debit and credit cards to better track your business expenses and then combine them with your receipts.

• Make notes on receipts about their business purpose. This is especially important for dining and entertainment expenses. Sure, you’ll know why you bought a new printer 6 months ago, but would you remember who you went to lunch with around the same date? Would you remember why you went to lunch with them?
  

• Do your books regularly. Ideally weekly, if you can’t then monthly. Delay your bookkeeping and you risk lost receipts and files, uncollected income and misclassified expenses. If you have don’t already have a  bookkeeper, Shellys Bookkeeping conveniently located in inner Brisbane, can help you with your small business bookkeeping and make sure it is done as often as required, and using the advantage of the cloud, this can be performed remotely. The advantages of having the work performed remotely, means you don’t need to supply office space and equipment – no interruption to your workplace either.
  

• Take a picture with your smartphone. Even if you haven’t already added Dext to your Xero account, you’ll have a visual record that you could upload later to the app. If you already have Dext you’ll know how easy it is to track your expenses and receipts – no more hoarding of paper documents, it can all be digital. Receipt Bank will extract the key financial information of your expenses sent via photos, email or direct upload of receipts, and send it to your accounting software file.

Shellys Bookkeeping are partners with Dext, making it even easier for your business to get started using Dext to save time. We can setup Dext for your business and the integration with your accounting software. This means you can start sending receipts in immediately. Contact Shelly  now to see how we can help your business.