You’re sending out emails filled with last-minute pleas for missing taxi and lunch receipts. Your desk is drowning with shoeboxes full of fading paper. This isn’t an accountant’s dream vacation; it’s the reality of chasing paper and email receipts.
A recent Wealthy Freelancer Report showed that SMBs lose a whopping $4000-$10,000 each year in trying to track and manage receipts manually.
But enough is enough; it’s time to get you out of the receipt chase and find better ways for you to collect receipts efficiently and save your business time, money, and resources. Your sanity (and your employees) will thank you.
Lost Receipts & Time: The Challenges In Manual Receipt Management
1. Delayed Receipt Submissions
Employees never turn in receipts on time as they could be traveling or simply have other things to do. And while it’s not the accountant’s primary responsibility, they end up spending a lot of time tracking down receipts from employees, a process that often takes hours every week with multiple messages, emails, and follow-ups.
2. Difficulty in Organizing receipts
Did you know that this process of manually sorting, verifying, and coding receipts into spreadsheets consumes an average of 8 minutes per receipt? For organizations with high volumes, like those processing 1000 receipts per month, that translates to a staggering 8000 minutes, or 133 hours, that you could’ve saved by simply choosing better methods of receipt management.
3. Manual Credit Card Statement Matching
Once the expenses have been coded onto the sheet, accountants would need to manually match them with the credit card statement once it’s made available by the bank. This means you’d have to constantly login to your bank accounts and download statements.
4. Poor Spend Visibility
With receipts coming in late, card statements arriving at the end of the month, and expenses spread across multiple spreadsheets, how can accountants possibly keep track of who's spending on what?
In fact, accountants have often told us that they need to figure out what employees purchased on their cards just based on who swiped it. This leads to zero accountability in card usage and zero visibility into spend. It makes it difficult to spot potential risks, operational inefficiencies, and instances of overspending.
5. Audits Become Nightmares
With no way to store all your receipts in one place, if there were an audit tomorrow, there would be a year’s worth of receipts to collect and organize.
Even if accountants managed to do this, without a proper audit trail, there would be no way of knowing policy violations, corrections, or any other kinds of communication that have happened around an expense report. Ensuring transparency and staying audit-ready becomes extremely difficult.
C-Suite & Finance on Manual Receipts: Time to Ditch the Chase?
We asked CXOs, and other finance leaders to share their thoughts on manual receipt management. Here’s what they had to say:
“I feel like I’m hunting down receipts every minute of every day, and I just don’t need that. Do you know how much time is lost? There has to be an easier way.” - A CFO in Construction
“I want receipts to come to us. I don’t want to go out and chase receipts from people.” - A Non-profit Finance Manager
“I need a way to gather the receipts that do not include them being emailed to me.” - Executive Director of Finance in Services
“Folks out in the field are always running around, and it's super important that it's not complicated when we ask them to do anything. It shouldn't be a battle; things need to be super easy. Like if they have to submit a receipt, they just need to send a text, and it's done.” - CEO at a Construction Firm
We heard the experts and thought to ourselves, how can we make this process easier for them?
How Fyle Reimagines And Solves Receipt Collection
Text-Message Receipt Collection
Users can just text their receipts to Fyle whether it’s a credit card expense or a reimbursement. Fyle will check if there's a matching card expense and automatically match it with the transaction. What’s more, users of any Visa, Mastercard, or American Express business credit card also get instant text notifications of card spend as and when their card is swiped.
Employees just need to click a picture of the receipt and text it to Fyle and it’s automatically matched! No app, no learning curve, no delays. Jump right in with instant ease.
Accountants can finally rejoice! This means no more chasing employees for receipts. Receipts arrive instantly via text message, speeding up your receipt collection process by 5x!
Forget the back-and-forth, the reminders, the clarifications. Fyle brings your receipts where you’d like them with zero effort.
Automated Credit Card Reconciliations
The days of manual data entry are over. Fyle’s real-time feeds reconciles transaction data with receipt data within seconds of it being uploaded by the user, cutting down your reconciliation time from days to just 2 minutes!
All this, without changing your existing credit cards.
In Conclusion
The receipt chase ends today. Forget about the shoeboxes, the emails, the garbage bags, and the frantic follow-ups. Experience the future of receipt collection: instant, seamless, and app-free, powered by Fyle.
