As much as we hate to admit it, the best business owners and executives can drop the ball on occasion. This is particularly true of the little things, which can be easily overlooked.

When it comes to keeping track of business expenses, even the most attentive and mindful can fall behind. Physical receipts and invoices can easily be misplaced before you set foot back in the office. Hunting around for them causes headaches, wastes time and hurts productivity.

When a business or its employees don’t stay on top of filing receipts, it usually results in paying more tax than you need to. That hurts. Not just your bottom line, but it feels bad to lose more of your hard-earned money. Thankfully, there is a way for you to keep your money and your productivity without going insane trying to stay on top of filing or scanning paper receipts.

The old, manual way

Traditionally you had to collect and collate your paper receipts. The problem with that, more often than not, is something comes up and you get disrupted. A little distraction creeps in and you leave the receipt behind, forget about it entirely, or it disappears before you can store it safely with the rest.

But there's another problem. The data from the documents that do make it to your stash need to be entered into spreadsheets. This too is fraught with potential problems. There are common issues like repetitive entries and human error. There's also the opportunity cost and wasted productivity of having someone copy information into a spreadsheet, when it can be done quicker and more reliably by a machine. And let's not forget the time lost trying to track down those lost and misplaced receipts. Wasting human potential on something so unproductive is bad business management. Given modern solutions, it's just not an efficient use of your own time or your employees’.

There are a lot of downsides to the old way. It served a purpose once when everything was done by hand. Today it's a relic. Businesses set up to take advantage of modern automation will overtake those still operating traditionally as they make better use of their time.

The new, automated way which saves time and money:

Receipt Bank is a mobile app that helps small- and medium-sized business owners and employees save time and boost their efficiency when it comes to processing receipts. Instead of worrying about keeping track of receipts and then entering information by hand, Receipt Bank does it all for you. All you need to do is take a photograph of the receipt. That's it—you're done.

The app then goes to work using sophisticated optical character recognition (OCR) to convert the photo into meaningful information for Xero. No manual work, no fiddling with paper receipts, no time wasted.

The app is available on both iOS and Android devices, meaning you can send receipts and invoices no matter where you are using your phone. There's never an inconvenient time or place.

It's designed for any sized team. You can add team members and give them different levels of access, approvals and expense reports that match their role in your business. You can even set up rules that tell Receipt Bank where and when to send transactional information, suppliers and payment methods. Using the app doesn't mean you have to change your entire process.

In just a few seconds you can accomplish what used to take a substantial amount of time. That's an impressive productivity gain. There's no risk of losing the receipt because you capture it the very moment you get it. With the information saved straight to the cloud, you won't suffer from any issues relating to duplicate or lost information either.

If you think this sounds nice but you're worried about security implications, Receipt Bank protects your data with 256-bit SSL encryption. That’s ‘geek speak’ for bank-level data security.

In short, Receipt Bank offers a service that automates your receipt-based bookkeeping and saves you and your employees time.

In an age of automation and efficiency, time is far too valuable to be spent handling receipts and manually entering data into spreadsheets. Automated bookkeeping gives your team more time to do the creative and uniquely human activities that make a real difference to your clients and your bottom line. The less time you can spend on bookkeeping, and the more time you can spend growing your business, the better off you will be.