Reconcile credit card payments with Clearspend intergration

Do you use ClearSpend to keep track of you card spending? Do you also want to start using an expense management app, but don’t want to manually export from one app to the next?

Well luckily for you, Capture Expense integrates with ClearSpend to allow you to process your card transactions directly into our software, removing the tedious need to go back and forth between apps.

In ClearSpend you can view cardholders transactions and balance information in real time as they happen, with handy graphs to help you analyse spend patterns. You can continue to use the app as you normally would, but with the added extra of expense management.

So where do we come in? With Capture Expense, you can easily create expense reports that combine credit card transactions with out of pocket expenses.

We’ve integrated with all accounting, payroll and major banks, we’re authorised and part of the Open Banking standard. Expense reports are created as either Purchase Invoices to pay emplyees via the ledger or journals are created at the point we export BACS payment to the bank. Costs can be allocated to the correct ledger codes and budgets updated within your relevant systems. The expense system process is fully auditable and can be reconciled along side other software. Integration is completed by file transfer which is robust but we also offer fully seamless direct API integration. We provide development services for any other bespoke requirements around system integration or expense reporting software.

This will save you a lot of time and money, as the manual process of exporting data from one app to the next is removed, streamlining the process, improving accuracy and saving your time for what matters most.

Contact us today for more information, or take a look at our other features, including travel management. Our software is automatically kept up-to-date with the latest approved Tax and vehicle fuel rates. You can also choose to override these standard rates or create their own records as required by your organisation. The software automatically calculates the correct Tax and stores every unit of value against each transaction line, after approval its ready for export.

You can also view the CO2 output for each journey, making sure you and your company can remain clear on your climate change goals.

For a full list of our features, take a look at our overview page here. If you have any questions, send us a message! We’d love to hear what you think.

How you can manage and streamline Construction business expenses

The construction industry is a wide and integral one, and whether you work in buildings, infrastructure or industrial, you need to manage your expenses.

You might be surprised at what expenses you can claim back as a builder, whether you’re paid through PAYE or work under the Construction Industry Scheme (CIS). However, depending on how you’re employed will change what you can claim back.

What can I claim?

Equipment

If you work on PAYE, you can claim costs for any tools or equipment that you paid for if your employer did not have the same or comparable item. As a CIS employee, you can deduct the cost of purchasing or replacing tools as an expense.

As a CIS or PAYE employee, you may be entitled to get reimbursed for wearing a uniform or protective equipment.

Travel

As a CIS employee, you are entitled to reimbursement for travel and subsistence expenses incurred while working at a temporary job. If your contract is less than 24 months, it is deemed transitory. If the term of your contract is unknown, the workplace will be deemed temporary until you have worked there for 24 months, at which point it will be considered permanent.

As a PAYE employee with a single permanent place of employment, you are unable to claim travel and subsistence costs. If you are compelled to work someplace else temporarily (for example, at another construction site), you will be eligible to claim transport and subsistence expenditures at that period.

Mileage can be claimed as an expense if it is incurred when travelling to a temporary work location. This implies that as a CIS employee, you may claim costs for the miles you’ve travelled for your contracts. You can only claim mileage charges as a PAYE employee while travelling to a temporary job site.

Capital

Unfortunately, as a PAYE builder, you are unable to claim capital costs, but if you operate as a builder under CIS, you can claim capital costs as long as they are acquired for business purposes. For example, if you buy something like a laptop or car just for job related matters, you can claim the capital costs back.

Vehicle costs

Like before, if you use a vehicle exclusively for business use, you can claim back the tax on mileage, road tax and insurance.

How we can help

Now you now a little more on what can be claimed back, how can you speed up this confusing and often time-consuming process of claiming back this money?

You need an automated expense management system for you and your employees. Be it a small business or enterprise, any company can benefit from using an expense management app to manage their finances in this area.

Corporate cards

Given employees credit cards to use for their expenses? Sick of having to chase up receipts? Expense Once uses open banking to automatically store a log of all expenses made by the employee, and allows them to easily take a picture of their receipt which is automatically scanned and the data checked against the credit card statement. Your employees should be focused on their important work, not on keeping track of receipts and expenses.

Get an accurate overview of your outgoings

Not only will your reports be more accurate and detailed, but you can assign tags to a project and see how much money is being spent on it at a glance. How much will the equipment set you back? What department is delaying your month-end reporting? Which costs are associated with which customer? And, perhaps most crucially, you can recognise money-saving options.

Approve remotely and easily

As all data is centralised, you can approve or deny expense reports on your phone or on desktop at any time of the day, no matter where you are. This improves the time frame in which expenses can be approved, and so improves cash flow.

Intuitive and easy to use software

Not wanting anything overly complicated? Expense Once excels in its ease of use and powerful features, as Tom Garner reviewed: “It was highly configurable and yet easy to understand, I’ve never seen any other system achieve this level of features with such ease of use.” So you can use a powerful effective tool without confusion or headaches. We also help you move onto the software to make the process as seamless and thorough as possible, so you don’t have to worry about missing data or misalignment from before moving to the system.

Got a specific requirement?

We pride ourself on our customer service so we work tirelessly to implement new features all the time, based on our unique customers needs. We know one size does not fit all, so we offer a large range of features which you can pick and choose as you need. And if you need something else, we are happy to look into how we can implement it.

So what are you waiting for? Contact us today to have a chat and see what we can do for your construction business

Receipt management for small businesses

Small business owners will know, a big part of running your own business is keeping track of paper receipts. Travel expenses stack up, and keeping track of where you’ve been and the cost of fuel, as well as what you purchased can get a little overwhelming. So why in todays world of mobile apps and digital data are you still storing and keeping track of purchases manually with paper copies?

Below is a list of key features you should be thinking about, as well as their benefits:

Receipt scanning apps

One way to begin your journey into a more efficient future is using an app to scan receipts and to keep a digital trail of your expenses. Organizing receipts physically can be tricky as you have to categorise and store them manually, but using a mobile app can help you store the information you need in an easy to access way.

You can store travel expenses, purchases of office supplies, food and drink, anything you want to expense quickly and easily. The most simple way is to simply just take a photo of a receipt, as at least you have a digital copy, but if you want to really make use of technology you can scan receipts for data and extract it, eliminating the need for you to manually input the data.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

OCR is a form of AI computing which allows software to scan images in real time to take out the valuable data. This allows you to use search systems to find the receipt you need based on cost, location, purchase, and date. No more time wasted looking back through piles of paper or even searching through each image in a directory, a simple search will bring up the document you need.

Auto-Fill on Expense Reports

Using this data you can automatically fill out expense reports in just mere moments. The data is accurate and detailed, meaning you won’t miss out in future on historic data. You can use it to create projections, analyse costs, and track spending in general. Receipt management and utilising the information they hold has never been more easy, so why are you still avoiding it?

Company Credit Cards

Another arduous element is linking credit card transactions with invoices or receipts, but a lot of the time this can be done automatically as well. For example, Capture Expense automatically collates company credit cards assigned to each user, and provides a feed of these transactions so you can easily check and update them. You can link any digital receipt, as the software stores your receipts in one place. If the software finds a receipt that perfectly matches one of your credit card expenses it will automatically link them, meaning you don’t even have to attach a receipt manually.

So you need an app to manage expenses receipts, which should you use? Capture Expense provides all of the key features outlined in this article and more, so book a demo today to try it out yourself. There are many management apps available, but combined with our sleek interface and many other features, Capture Expense provides a powerful expense tracker app that is also available on desktop, so you can access what you need wherever you are.

Just listen to one of our many positive reviews from G2:

“Capture Expense is such a great tool to streamline the process of improving business expenses and submitting receipts. The process makes keeping up with my business purchases so easy.”

It truly is as easy as that. So book a demo today!

How to use our Expense Management App

Wondering how to use an expense manager app? Capture Expense provides an easy to use fully functional app which you can use on your phone or tablet.

Here is our quick and simple guide to how it works. First off lets find out how to install it:

Now you’ve got it installed, how does it work? As a purpose built expenses app, it couldn’t be easier. You can input your expenses manually under the ‘Expenses’ tab, or you can you click the receipt tab and take a photo of a receipt. Our mobile application uses smart cropping which automatically prepares the image for optimal processing by removing the background, adjusting colour and contrast, and removing distortion and skew. It then reads the full text from the image, and the merchant, description, tax and claim amount is used to pre-populate the expense entry. This means little to no time typing in data, removing errors and saving you time.

Navigate through our clean and intuitive system which allows you submit expenses just a few clicks. Our software is built and maintained using the latest web standards which is known as a progressive web application. It has a responsive layout meaning it adapts to every size of screen whether desktop, laptop or tablet. 

We also offer a mobile version which is fully-featured and allows employees to capture receipts, raise, view and submit expenses. Line managers and finance can also use the mobile app to approve expense claims. 

All the features available to the desktop version are also available to mobile, except administration and maintenance tasks, so you never have to worry about keeping track or submitting you expenses late again.

Still using Excel Templates for Expense Management?

Microsoft Excel is the bookkeeping software of choice for many small businesses. This is especially true for small business entrepreneurs and start ups. It’s been around for a long time, with many, many Excel templates online, and sample accounting formulae readily available. Even better, you most likely already have it installed on your laptop. It’s the most accessible bookkeeping worksheet available when you initially start your firm.

However, when your company grows, you’ll quickly find you don’t have time to cope with the manual effort necessary to keep Excel up to date. You’ll soon have to make a business decision: do you devote time and effort to MS Excel and the hazards that come with it? Should you enter all of your company’s financial data into accounting software or not? You want to keep costs down, but in the long run, will you actually be spending more due to the time needed to use excel?

For small business owners, Excel is a good place to start. It’s difficult to miss the free Excel versions’ access to customisable, basic spreadsheets. Owners, on the other hand, will quickly uncover a slew of issues, including the possibility of faulty calculations, missing data, and lost files. And the more time you spend on a spreadsheet, the more difficult it will be to maintain your records in order, leaving you with less time to focus on your business.

Below are just 8 reasons why using Excel exclusively for expense management is no longer feasible.

1. Input by hand

The sticker price of a product like Excel has nothing to do with its cost. It all comes down to how much time it takes to handle. Unfortunately, Excel necessitates a significant amount of time. Every company cost must be manually entered. Every transaction must be entered twice if you use double-entry accounting, as mandated by the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. That’s twice as much data entering by hand.

Everything from expenditure reports to the chart of accounts must be entered manually. This not only takes time, but it also raises the danger of making a mistake. What does this mean in terms of cost for small businesses?

Assume you have a part-time employee who completes financial tasks. The employee works 20 hours each week since they have to manually enter data into Excel. Assume that the employee is paid £12 per hour and works 50 weeks per year.

In this scenario, you’re allocating £12,000 only to accounting data entry. This is not only exorbitant, but it also ignores the lost opportunity costs of not being able to spend that time on sales, marketing, or hiring.

2. A scarcity of historical information

Another problem with Excel accounting spreadsheets is that they don’t do a good job of storing historical data. Companies frequently lose historical data, making it harder to spot financial patterns. Companies can plan and budget better if they can spot financial patterns.

Do you, for example, see a spike in sales in December? If that’s the case, you could need to employ seasonal labour or increase your supply. You may miss out on chances or lose money if you are unable to recognise trends.

This is not only aggravating, but it may also result in legal issues. Imagine being called for an IRS audit only to discover that the information from the relevant year is missing from your company’s spreadsheet template. That is an issue.

3. Visualization is a challenge

The Excel format is useful for big volumes of data, as described in the preceding paragraph. However, when it comes to understanding the data, it’s not very useful. In fact, Excel interprets data using visualisation tools such as tables and graphs.

While this may be beneficial in some sectors, it is not applicable to commercial accounting. Assume you own a business with a £1 million annual sales. Trying to keep track of transactions in categories like accounts receivable or accounts payable may be difficult, especially when dealing with large amounts of data. Unlike accounting software, you can’t enlarge or compress an Excel table.

4. It is not widely recognised in the corporate sector

While Excel may work for your little firm, it is rarely accepted by the rest of the business world. It’s possible that investors will be put off by your use of it. Your accountant or bookkeeper will, too.

Data analysts who crunch figures and perform pivot tables may find Excel beneficial. However, business owners who are concerned with tracking business transactions in the general ledger and preparing financial statements such as balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements will run into issues with the software at some point.

With better tools, the number of hours spent on accounting lowers, lowering the time-value cost.

5. There is no integration

Excel does not interact effectively with your other financial apps, such as credit cards and bank accounts, which is similar to the fact that it involves a lot of manual effort.

You may be able to get your statements in spreadsheet format from your credit card and bank firms, but you’ll still need to input and organise all of this information into your existing accounting spreadsheet. This, too, takes a long time and puts you at risk.

If you make a mistake when inputting data, it might take hours or days to figure out what went wrong. Having your transactions automatically imported into your accounting software decreases the chances of this happening.

6. You’ll end up with two spreadsheets that aren’t in sync

Inconsistent spreadsheets are one of Excel’s most difficult problems to spot until it’s too late.

This happens on a regular basis. You must manually input and alter data in various locations since Excel isn’t a central hub for all your accounting, budgeting, and inventory needs. This is a problem that affects businesses of all sizes. However, the larger an organisation becomes, the more likely it is to be exposed to it. According to Ventana Research, roughly 44% of enterprise-sized firms have spreadsheets that are inconsistent.

The main issue with statistics that don’t add up is that it’s difficult to find out why they don’t. While two spreadsheets can be reconciled, if a mistake was made a few months earlier, it’s a real pain to sort out.

7. Spreadsheets aren’t designed to scale

When you’re initially starting out, Excel can be a good option. However, when your business expands, you may need to adjust your rates, raise capital, launch a few new goods, or recruit a few additional employees. Your spreadsheet may soon be unable to keep up with your company’s finances.

8. Small mistakes compound

Errors in spreadsheets have a cascade effect. If even one cell in your spreadsheet is incorrect, it might have far-reaching consequences. If you enter an inaccurate digit or a missed comma or decimal point in one field, your spreadsheet will utilise it to perform subsequent calculations incorrectly.

There are many aspects of business that you have no influence over. Expense management is not one of them. With the right tools and management it can become a stress free and easy process, which can lead you to insights you never would have been able to have before.

Capture Expense eliminates these issues

With our very competitively priced software, you can save money, time, and gain control over your money management. Uploading and keeping track of expenses becomes easy and efficient with both our desktop and mobile app. Contact us today for more information, and take your business to the next level.