In or last article, we highlighted the importance of business efficiency. We identified several choices for you depending upon your business needs and provided you critical questions to make a business decision about your accounting needs. Our focus in this article is identifying the critical area related to expenses – data capture applications!
Data Capture Applications
The one thing plaguing every business is maintaining copies of bills and receipts from vendors. They are pesky little demons that seem to always get lost or they are never filed in the correct place. They require you to have file cabinets to store them or a scanner to keep them electronically. If audited by any government agency, they are a must have! They are by far the biggest pain for every business owner regardless of size! However, there are data capture applications with benefits. Use a data capture application to:
a. Automatically fetch your bills, bank and credit card statements
b. Accept scanned or smartphone/tablet copied bills and receipts
c. Email directly to the application
d. Eliminate data entry time
e. Have mobile apps for smartphones and tablets
Using artificial intelligence and optical character recognition, these are data capture applications that businesses can utilize. Be aware, the applications have been listed in ‘alphabetical order’ without regard to any assessment of their performance nor is there a ranking or comparison of the applications. There are many more applications but these are identified because of a specific unique feature that they each have.
Data Capture Applications
- AutoEntry
- Greenback
- Hubdoc
- Receipt Bank
Analysis and evaluation of the software versus your business is mandatory based on many factors but may make your business more efficient and save you countless hours at year end trying to gather documents for tax purposes. However, here’s some standout features for the products listed above.
1. AutoEntry – the ability to pull in line item detail from invoices for inventory items with or without the company utilizing purchase orders and to include them, by line item rules into different account types. However, AutoEntry captures bills, receipts, sales invoices, bank and credit card statements and more.
2. Greenback – Track spending, in real time, where your business shops the most by automatically fetching itemized receipts directly from top merchants and platforms. With Greenback you connect directly to the stores and vendor channels to fetch itemized sales and expense receipts.
3. HubDoc – the automatic collection feature retrieves your financial information from bank and credit card companies, gas companies, government agencies, insurance companies, investment, and various other vendors. The company boasts a minimum of 28 pages of vendors that they retrieve information to maintain the information in one location.
4. Receipt Bank– the industry innovator, it is hard to pick one feature as a standout. Auto-publishing and supplier rules were initiated in Receipt Bank prior to the other applications even existing. The software extracts the information from bills, receipts and invoices and provides an image of the source document.
Still trying to determine a direction? Answer these three questions first:
a) Do you have the time to learn the application?
b) Are you able to keep up-to-date on new tax laws in order to avoid legal troubles or do you have an accounting professional to assist you with understanding the changes that impact your business?
c) How easy is the data capture application to manage the data and get real-time information?
Speak with your accounting professional to determine what may work best with your business. Or give us a call so we can assist you with identifying the best choice!
Sources: www.getapp.com www.whichaddon.com & qbo.intuit.com – Apps tab