How to scan receipts: Everything you need to know

In your everyday life, you probably decline the offer of a receipt for most purchases. Not every grocery trip or tank of fuel requires a receipt, because chances are there isn’t much you can do with it.

Your daily business life however, is quite different. Pairing receipts with transactions made for business purposes is important for expenses logging, reimbursements, audits, and understanding your company’s financial health.

In this blog, we’re going to discuss how to scan receipts. We’ll go over the advantages, which devices you can use to scan receipts, and some common challenges you might run into when scanning receipts.

Scanning receipts has a lot going for it—especially when you consider the alternative is collecting and holding onto paper receipts. Let’s go over a few of the main advantages you’ll benefit from when you start scanning your receipts.

It might not seem like it, but physical receipts are far less secure than scanning digital ones. Physical receipts get damaged, lost, and can easily be stolen. Even if you manage to keep all of your receipts in a folder, The folder is still at risk of all the above dangers.

Storing your receipts on a secure cloud storage platform is a way to ensure more security. While you should still keep your physical receipts, you now have a digital backup which can’t be physically altered or destroyed, and is ideally in a password protected vault only accessible by you and your finance team.

Running a business can lead to a lot of clutter. Receipts, invoices, expense reports, inventory, and more, can all lead to one giant, messy paper trail. This is why it’s important for business owners to minimize clutter wherever they can, especially when filing travel expense reports. Too much clutter can make it easy for you to lose track of vital aspects of your business’s performance, and may cause serious problems in the future.

Scanning your receipts and storing them in cloud storage can eliminate a huge part of this clutter, especially if your storage methods are well managed.

With digitally accessible receipts, you have the option to categorize, search for, and automatically send when you need, which simplifies receipt management. This ultimately gives you a lot more control over vital data, in a way that physical receipt collection cannot afford.

With receipt scanning software, you can password protect your copies with two-factor authentication, making sure your receipts are safe while remaining easily accessible.

It’s much easier to do your bookkeeping when everything’s digital. You can send scanned receipts directly to your accountant or upload them to your accounting software, store them in your banking platform app, automate expenses, and access everything on the go from your smartphone.

Using your smartphone to scan receipts is probably the most convenient and common form of receipt scanning. You can do it on the go with the device you likely already have in your pocket, and with app technology it’s both seamless and safe.

Scanning receipts with your smartphone is a simple process with only a few steps:

1. Take a photo of the receipt with your phone camera
2. Convert the file to a file type of your choice (.pdf, .jpg, etc.)
3. Store the document in cloud storage

If you have a smartphone as well as a laptop, the easiest way would be to simply email the scanned receipt to yourself and access it from your laptop. However, if you don’t have a smart or can’t use it to scan receipts, you can use a scanner and complete the process in a few steps:

• Plug your scanner into your USB or connect it via bluetooth
• Find the scanning application on your operating system
• Find the new scan option
• Place the receipt face down in your scanner, in the corner of the glass
• Scan the receipt
• Save it to your chosen destination on your laptop

The main challenge you’ll face when scanning receipts is finding the right software for you. There are many different receipt scanning apps on the market and picking the right one means assessing which best suits you.

Here are a few of the things you can look for when selecting the right receipt scanning technology for you:

• Cost: whether or not the app has a free trial, what its paid version offers, whether paying for it makes financial sense.
  
  
• Mobile app: does the software come with a mobile app option, is the app user-friendly for you, is the app available in your region.
  
  
• Other features: if the app provides general expense management features as well as receipt scanning.
  
  
• Teams or solo: if the app is best suited to one user or in a collaboration.
  
  
• Integration: does the app integrate with my business banking platform of choice?

Qonto’s financial management solution has receipt collection capabilities, allowing users to clean up their paper trails.

Receipt scanning with the Qonto app can be done in a few steps:

1. Take a photo of your paper receipts with your smartphone and upload it to the app
2. Forward the now digitized receipts to your dedicated email address
3. Import receipts automatically with Zapier or Integromat (Integrations and Partnerships’s receipt collection integrations)