Receipt capture
Getting receipts into a finance system, by photo, email, inbox sync or a direct feed from the point of sale. They can be coded and matched.
In short
- The goal is to capture every receipt at the time of purchase, not at month end.
- Methods range from a phone photo to data sent straight from the merchant's POS.
- Each method trades effort against accuracy. The less typing and reading involved, the fewer errors.
Receipt capture is the first step of expense and bookkeeping work: collecting the evidence for each purchase and bringing it into the system where it will be checked, coded and posted. Everything later in the process, from matching to reimbursement to the month-end close, depends on the receipt being there.
The main methods
- Photo: the employee snaps the paper receipt with a phone. Simple, but it depends on people remembering, and on the image being readable.
- Email forwarding: online receipts are forwarded to a dedicated address.
- Mailbox sync: the system connects to an inbox and picks up receipts on its own.
- Point-of-sale push: the merchant's system sends the receipt as data at the moment of payment, with no paper involved.
Why timing matters
A receipt captured at the counter is easy. The same receipt searched for three weeks later, when the card statement arrives, may be faded, lost or impossible to tie to a charge. Most missing-receipt problems are really late-capture problems, which is why methods that need no action from the buyer tend to produce the most complete records.
Worked example
A month of receipts for one employee
A consultant makes 34 card purchases in March. Twelve online receipts come in through mailbox sync, 15 in-person purchases are photographed on the spot, and 5 arrive from merchants' point-of-sale systems automatically. Two are missing at month end. That is a 94% capture rate, and the two gaps are known on April 1 rather than discovered during an audit.