Being a freelancer is a time-consuming endeavour – you are always hustling for time, for new clients and generally to break even. The administrative burden of running a small business is already massive and the need to ‘collect’ receipts for HMRC spending rules is another massive drain on your already drained resources.
The rollout last year of Making Tax Digital has also spearheaded a new imperative to help make digital experiences more mainstream within the business landscape in the UK.
Another important reason to go digital with e-receipts is the environmental impact of all those paper-based receipts and the carbon footprint costs associated with their usage and deployment in our society. As we can tap our cards on public transport or swipe our sports watches to pay for stuff, surely as the world goes digital hoarding paper seems so pointless. Here’s how you can go digital with your receipts.
What Can You Do?
With 12.1 Billion receipts issued in 2017/18, there is a demand for more businesses to provide an alternative to the paper receipts. Some are transporting their systems into the twenty-first century with more and more retailers offering customers the opportunity of a digital bill of sale.
Making Tax Digital, HM Government’s new drive to force individuals and companies to submit tax returns digitally has helped to push the wider narrative around digitisation. However, freelancers also need to start pushing this paperless receipt experience more than their Ltd company rivals.
Now thanks to MTD, you can send digital receipts along with your accounts if your company’s turnover exceeds £85,000 a year. This means that shoeboxes full of paper are a thing of the past!
MTD has also forced companies to digitise their accounting software – by using cloud-based products from Xero, Sage or QuickBooks. Approved platforms like these are a godsend to paperless aficionados.
Prestige Business Management can help you with cloud-based accountancy solutions. We are QuickBooks Silver certified professionals and we can help set up QuickBooks to help make sure you are MTD ready.
Receipt Bank – Our Latest Partnership
Furthermore, we have partnered with Receipt Bank, an app-based digital receipt scanner and upload tool, that can help you whilst you’re on the go record receipts and upload them to QuickBooks. This technology can help to make paperless a day-to-day norm for your business. The biggest positive is that you can’t lose any receipts as the digitisation process and the cloud means you’ll always have access to your receipts.
However, you will need to use tools like ReceiptBank or QuickBooks to categorise your receipts – so that you don’t have a digital jumble of photos to go through. By using filtering and categorisation tools you can better manage your e-receipts and always make sure they are accessible as and when you need them for your business.
Why not get in touch with Prestige Business Management today? We can help you with your journey to paperless nirvana. We can help get you set up with QuickBooks, introduce you to ReceiptBank and generally help you grasp the importance of paperless receipts and how they can help change the way you do business in the future? Call us today on 0203 773 2927 to talk to us about digital bookkeeping and paperless receipts.
