The Receipt Bank Blog

Save valuable creative time with Xero, Receipt Bank and the magical elves

We’re not your average accountancy practice. We like to do things differently at My Accountancy Place. And we’re on a mission to help make accountancy fun, while also popularising the age-old British tradition of biscuits at teatime…and elevenses…in fact, pretty much any time, really.

Our clients are probably not your average businesses either. We work with a lot of hip, creative agencies and beard-sporting creative thinkers and, on the whole, they’re not too engaged by dull spreadsheets and fiddly, technical-looking desktop accountancy software. If Jonathan Ive didn’t design it, they’re just not interested.

That’s why Xero is our weapon of choice. Once we fire up the Xero dashboard and show clients how easy cloud accounting can be, they tend to get hooked. They love the simplicity, they love the beautiful user interface and they love how easy it is to use.

Xero also gives us an amazing platform for our practice, so we’ve got access to the ever-expanding world of Xero Add-ons. And our favourite, of course, is Receipt Bank.

Why Receipt Bank is the bee’s knees

We really love Receipt Bank. It is the bee’s knees, the dog’s do-dahs and the hippopotamus’s elbows. And this devotion has come about through seeing the staggering impact that Receipt Bank can have on your average business’s financial efficiency.

There was a time, way back in the year 2006BCA (before cloud accounting), when small businesses would habitually collect hundred and thousands of bits of paper. These receipts, expenses, invoices and bills would gradually build up over time until, on rare occasions, the company’s bookkeeper would actually become completely surrounded by huge, impenetrable walls of paperwork and would never be seen again.

Then, in 2010, along came Receipt Bank with a devilishly simple way of combating the problem of disappearing bookkeepers.

The answer was to do away with all that troublesome paperwork, thus freeing bookkeepers, finance teams and business owners from the tyranny of hard-copy receipts. Not quite as dramatic as Frodo escaping from Mordor, but probably just as much of a relief for anyone who’d been chained to a burning-hot copy of Excel up to this point.

How Receipt Bank frees up our clients’ time

What Receipt Bank does is magically scan in all your paperwork (and it is magic – we’ve seen the tiny elves that work at Receipt Bank HQ). Then it automatically pulls the data straight into Xero! Now that’s definitely magic – possibly even voodoo…something mysterious, anyway. But we don’t care how it works because we’re just so happy at the amount of time it saves our clients and ourselves.

- No more hours sat tapping away at a spreadsheet, entering data and occasionally hitting your chin on your laptop as you doze off.

- No more searching in crumb-filled pockets, down the backs of sofas and under car seats for lost receipts and forgotten pieces of paper.

- No more wondering how much you’ve spent on expenses this month and whether it’s a financially astute move to buy another double choc muffin.

The power of magical scanning elves

What Receipt Bank does is streamline the whole process of getting our client’s data into their accounting software. And by making the process faster and more efficient it frees up a huge amount of time – time that these creative businesses can spend on designing an amazing logo, writing a funky new blog or comparing new knitwear purchases with each other.

There’s even a mobile app, so you can snap your receipts on the go. Once snapped, you don’t need to keep the paperwork, freeing up valuable pocket space for Snickers bars/mints/coffee loyalty cards.

With the Receipt Bank app on your phone (powered by those hard-working elves) you can:

- Capture a receipt one-handed while eating ice cream and snap it into your account.

- Snap your hotel receipt and tell reception they can throw it away.

- Scan your artisan coffee receipts, lose the paper copies and still know exactly how much your caffeine habit is costing each month.

- Forward email receipts to a unique Receipt Bank email address and then delete the email receipt.

And we love Receipt Bank because it means we don’t have to do the tedious data entry either. With all our clients’ data pulled straight into their Xero ledgers, it’s ready to be reviewed, analysed and generally kicked about. And that means we can offer much more helpful, much more insightful, much more real-time advice and guidance to our clients.

So, thanks for making us look good, Receipt Bank! Just don’t forget to feed those magical elves, or we’ll all be going back to the dark days of stress and spreadsheets.

There’s more about My Accountancy Place on the Receipt Bank partner page here.

Paul Barnes, Managing Director at My Accountancy Place