The Receipt Bank Blog

I implemented Receipt Bank even before Day 1 of launching Portt & Co. Whilst employed, I did a few VAT returns for friends and family and, being far too lazy to type up the purchase invoices myself, I had my daughter – who was 7 at the time – scan in all the documents and we then uploaded these to Receipt Bank. I was hooked from that moment on.

In pursuit of paperless

In 2015 I launched Portt & Co to provide innovative finance departments for small businesses. Our aim is to make our clients’ lives easier and more enjoyable. We believe the best way to do this is to help their businesses succeed. And for our clients’ businesses to be successful, they need up-to-date and accurate financial information which tells them why their business is performing the way it is, and what areas they can improve upon.

We achieve this by having highly systemised processes for receiving information from clients, in the way that we produce their financials and then the way we report those to them. This is the same principle for both our bookkeeping and payroll services.

As part of these services, we always look to implement automation wherever possible to speed up the delivery of the information we provide and to keep labour costs to a minimum. What we’re able to do therefore is provide innovative outsourced finance departments for aspirational businesses. This encompasses a 100% Xero and Receipt Bank bookkeeping operation.

Every team member has two 27” monitors on their desk and this enables us to be almost totally paperless. We will always ensure that we are abreast of the latest technological fintech developments so that we are as efficient and systemised as can be, whilst making the submission of our data as easy as possible for clients.

Within our firm we seek to trust and empower our employees and allow them to develop in a supportive environment where mistakes are viewed as an opportunity to improve. It is fundamental to our principles that our colleagues get to enjoy a good work-life balance.

Receipt Bank: the tireless worker

I think just being able to give clients an app to submit their receipts to us completely conceptualises what we are about and frames us as a forward-thinking, innovative firm without any further explanation.

The key impact that Receipt Bank has had on business has been the ability to scale up our growth: from starting on my own in the front room of my house in 2015, to a team of eight employees three years later. I liken Receipt Bank to a worker who never gets tired, can process as much volume as you throw at them and who will always deliver on timescales.

Accurate and accessible

The main challenge that Receipt Bank solves for us is that we can process high volumes of data very quickly. We can also build in quality control by reviewing the extracted data before posting through to Xero. Previously you would be 100% reliant on the accuracy of the person typing in that data.

One of my favourite features as a business owner is the consistency which can be applied by using Supplier Rules [Receipt Bank’s automated supplier categorisation tool] to deliver consistent and repetitive action. Also, as a person, I thought it was great when Sainsbury's started printing double-sided receipts to halve the amount of paper they used. But in our business it caused huge problems because people could only snap one side of the receipt. So when Receipt Bank introduced the combined mode to take pictures of double-sided or multi-page receipts that made me really happy.

One of our clients owns a wedding venue in Devon, a holiday rental business in London and, more recently, a hotel in the southwest of England. They also spend much of the year at their holiday home in France. Working with traditional paper or local desktop solutions would have been impossible for this client, but wherever they are in the world they can submit data to us and get information from us, whilst always knowing who owes them money and who they owe money to.

If, like Matt, you want to position yourself as an innovative, forward-thinking firm, then it's crucial that you have the right technology in place. Register for one of our webinars today to see Receipt Bank in action for yourself and experience effortless bookkeeping.