Auto Save Receipts and Attach in QBO

In this post, we want to continue to explore the added mobility possible with QuickBooks Online (QBO).

Craig, from the QBO sample company Craig’s Design and Landscaping Services, is a busy person. He doesn’t want to spend any more time on receipt tracking, paper filing, and similar tasks than absolutely necessary.

At the same time, he’s out of the office a lot and creates expenses while he’s on the go. How can we make things as easy for Craig as possible?

It’s conference week. Craig is attending a conference and needs to track expenses while there. For breakfast he visits the Starbucks in Hotel Nikko in San Francisco. With his iPhone (this works with Android devices as well), he takes a picture of his receipt.

For lunch, Craig steps across the street and grabs a sandwich at the Sunflower Café.

By using a free Dropbox account and completing a little setup on his phone, Craig’s pictures are automatically uploaded to his Dropbox account. No action is necessary from him except to take the picture of the receipt. (more specifics on this later)

Overnight, the transactions Craig created with his debit or credit card download into QBO. The bookkeeper accesses the bank activity and accepts the transactions.

She opens the Dropbox folder and there are Craig’s receipts.

The bookkeeper simply drags the receipt image from the Dropbox folder to attach it to the transaction in QBO.

While this action can be performed while in the process of adding the transactions from the bank feed, it’s harder to show in a screenshot.

Done!

There are a number of ways to get receipt images into QBO and processed easily and quickly. This one is particularly automated, but requires some additional setup. We wish we could take credit for the idea, but actually this very impressive solution comes from Jennie who runs the QuickBooks Online blog. The link to her post is here:

http://quickbooks.intuit.com/blog/quickbooks-attachments-tips-part-2/

Yes. It works for Android devices too.

Brilliant, Jennie!

Hector Garcia, CPA
Certified Advanced QuickBooks ProAdvisor
7791 NW 46th St. Suite 109
Doral, FL 33166
954-414-1524
hector@garciacpa.com