Reconciling expenses can be a pain for bookkeepers or business owners who every so often need to wade through a pile of receipts and input them into accounting software. Even if your bookkeeping solution automatically imports transactions from bank or credit card accounts there’s still the matter of categorizing them according to the job they’re associated with or the employee responsible for an expense.
American Express small business cardholders who use online or desktop versions of QuickBooks will soon have a better option. In the first quarter of 2014 the app for iOS and Android will get an upgrade that lets you snap a photo of a receipt with your smartphone, tag it based on what kind of expense it is, the job it will be billed to, and the employee who made the purchase, syncing such categorizations and the image both to your American Express statement and directly into QuickBooks.
The benefits are twofold. Tagging can be done once, on the fly as expenses are actually made, reducing the chance that a receipt will be lost before someone can sit down and tag it in QuickBooks. And since digital copies of receipts are accepted by the IRS, uploading them to QuickBooks also lets you throw away your paper versions.
The American Express ReceiptMatch app currently lets users upload photos of receipts to their credit card statement. Expanding this feature to QuickBooks stems from an exclusive partnership between Intuit and American Express OPEN, the company’s small business division.
According to American Express EVP Manish Gupta, since the recession the company has seen an increase in B2B spending.
“Over the last few years what we’ve really seen is businesses start using our products for larger and larger spend to run their businesses,” he says. “We started thinking through what else we can do to help them to solve any pain they have in their expense management.”