TL;DR: He relies on 3 different online services to scan business receipts and track expenses. None are needed.
He spends hours (days) trying to automate what he himself claims is only a few expenses per month (and shows a photo of a very thin folder of receipts).
I can’t imagine his business will be ever very successful. He wastes too much time toying with simple things.
But aside from that, if one wants a “no code” solution to tracking expenses, along with imaged receipts in case later proof is needed here you go:
1. Take pic of receipt. If you need multiple pics per image, you can combine images post de facto via something like Apple’s Preview app (save as PDF), or you can use Apple Notes to do for you. I assume other competing platforms have similar options. Worst case scenario: simply add “page-2”, “page-3”, in the file name.
2. Save image file in a directory called “business-receipts”.
3. Name file with receipt date, vendor, amount, and maybe description or anything else. Date comes first for easy finding later. “2020-06-15 ATT 63-00 USD Monthly business cell bill.pdf”
4. Enter transaction into appropriate tab of business finances spreadsheet (cash, bank, credit card, etc.)
5. Add a category for the expense, if you want.
6. Get back to work.
Benefits?
1. No code necessary (unless you count your initial spreadsheet setup and the use of VLOOKUP for reporting). Call me crazy but if you’ve been going through all the gyrations outlined in the article, I assume you’ve mastered VLOOKUP or can do so in 10 minutes and that you’ve also graduated Junior High school.
2. No trusting OCR “auto-populate”. Most of us can type faster than these things can think. Also, if you trust those (without verifying each time), I have some perfectly safe driverless cars to sell you.
3. Almost no technical debt. No API depreciation. No risk of anyone being bought out.
4. Offline. Works without the internet. As did most all business processes 25 years ago on PCs. Amazing. No clunky browser needed either.
5. Secure. Your data is kept Local First. If you choose to backup online, so be it. Encrypt and Backup. But all your prior processing between multiple “services” (with your unencrypted data being manipulated on their ends) is no longer necessary.
Counter-Arguments:
1. Excel is now also a “service”: True but it’s more popular and has more staying power than any of the ones you’re using. If you really think you don’t want to pay monthly for Excel (not sure what business can avoid this), there are plenty of free options. And for the purposes of this method, at least, you could do this on Excel 97 (buy once, use ‘forever’).
2. Still have to deal with online storage: Well, no you don’t, but let’s pretend that you only trust hard drives in the cloud and not the $100 4Tb one you can get at Walmart. So what? Encrypt and send it on up. If you use Macs or Office365, you likely have plenty of room already. Why involve another third-party? But anyway, this is a part of the “no code” process you added as if it was unique only to that process. It’s a bigger part of a different decision on how you store, encrypt, and/or backup your business data. A single line CRON job would take care of this, unless you count that as “code” since it involves typing a line of text instead of 47 mouse clicks.
3. This isn’t multi-user: True. Based on the 2 receipts per month statement, and the thin Lemonade Stand folder of receipts, it didn’t seem worthy of that functionality. If multi-user is needed, and the free WaveApp is costing you sleep, Quickbooks is your solution. Welcome to the world of Big Boy Businesses where the owners work hard and underlings do data entry into complex software.