For many companies, managing expenses involves much fumbling around with paper receipts, entering manual data into spreadsheets, or mailing items to the finance department. Getting reimbursed for a team lunch, for instance, can become a tedious and time-consuming task. But by implementing a digital solution like an expense management tool equipped with a receipt scanner app, the process can be streamlined, saving time for both the employees and their Finance teams.

The potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is unfolding day by day, and it’s been impressive to experience first-hand how it has changed the way we manage receipts and expenses. At Rydoo, we’ve been harnessing AI’s capabilities to make our receipt scanner smarter than ever, making it easier to submit expenses seamlessly in just under a few seconds and with little margin for error. Some might even say it’s a kind of magic, but it’s just technology at its best, and it can be an organisation’s greatest ally for managing expenses.

How does a receipt scanner work?

By now, you’ve probably used a document scanner at least once. Place a document on the scanner’s surface, press a button, and it’s saved in your hard drive. But what if a scanner could go a step further and be the solution to help you ditch the piles of paper receipts cluttering your wallet or desk drawers? A receipt scanner can do exactly that and more.

Receipt scanners such as the one Rydoo’s solution provides are handy tools that capture images of receipts. It’s that simple: you take a picture of the piece of paper, and it will keep it for you. Then, through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, the software extracts key information that allows you to submit a receipt. Information such as merchant name, date, amount, and much more are automatically retrieved without you having to insert this information manually.

This advanced feature allows the system to intelligently interpret and convert the printed or handwritten text into a digital format. The data retrieved from that can then be transferred automatically to the expense management software, saving the tedious task of manually entering expense data.

Rydoo’s innovative receipt scanner uses this same technology, and it can scan and read the data from a receipt of an expense incurred anywhere in the world with extreme accuracy. Thanks to the latest technological advancements and leveraging AI capabilities, it can even read handwritten and blurry images. All this in under 5 seconds.

Another great feature of Rydoo’s receipt scanner is its ability to scan either single or multiple receipts in just one batch. It can all be done on the go through our top-ranked mobile app, which can help avoid saving piles of receipts and the hassle of submitting them all manually by the end of the month.

Our system keeps evolving beyond simple data extraction and recognition. Unlike previous models, we’ve expanded our software’s capabilities, which now uses AI to analyse the receipt’s content and consider the user’s past expense history to choose the most suitable category for the expense.

This means that, aside from the date, amount, currency and merchant’s name, the software can retrieve the country and VAT rate, automatically understand the expense category, and populate it into the submission form. Imagine a situation where an employee submits an expense from a restaurant, and the receipt states the time of the meal was around dinner. With these features, AI will analyse that submission, consider the account’s history, and automatically fill the category to be set for dinner. Magic, right?

4 reasons why a receipt scanner makes the expense management process easier

We’ve covered the many capabilities a receipt scanner can have in your day-to-day life, but how does it benefit an organisation’s expense management process? Dealing with expenses is often seen as a dreadful task that most finance teams must endure daily, but using software equipped with a powerful receipt scanner can make a world of difference.

Here are some reasons why a receipt scanner can help with expensing.

Save Time

Processing expenses manually can take up a lot of time, as employees can spend over 3 minutes entering data from each receipt. Think of how long it would take to do this at the end of each month for thousands of expenses at the end of the month.

A smart receipt scanning software like Rydoo helps to streamline this process and save time. Employees can snap pictures of their receipts immediately, and the technology extracts key details in seconds.  Those hours spent manually crunching the numbers into a spreadsheet can now go towards valuable and strategic work.

Avoid loss of receipts

We’ve all been in this situation before. After lunch with a client, you throw the receipt in your pocket; it falls or gets so crumpled in your trousers that it’s illegible, so you cannot submit an expense.

Using a receipt scanner will avoid this issue by allowing you to take a photo and save a digital copy. There is no need to keep unnecessary clutter in your desk drawers and worry about losing important documents.

Increase security

Documents such as receipts and invoices are stored digitally after you submit them as an expense, which is safer than keeping a physical copy of these documents.

Cloud services like the one Rydoo uses are highly secure and fully compliant with GDPR requirements. The data can be stored for over 10 years, and a disaster recovery plan is tested annually for added security.

Easier auditing

Storing receipts digitally makes it easier to share them with external auditors or tax authorities in case of an external audit. As more and more countries allow organisations to store their documents in digital format, keeping a physical copy of the documents is no longer necessary. You can check Rydoo’s Compliance Centre to learn more about local norms and regulations for your country.

Aside from this, Rydoo offers extra policy checks that are designed to identify non-receipts, duplicates, and handwritten amounts, thereby minimising the risk of reimbursing non-compliant expenses.

Using a receipt scanner can be a game-changer for the expense management process, as it eliminates tedious manual data entry, saves time, reduces the risk of lost receipts, enhances security, streamlines expense processing, and simplifies audits. By embracing this technology, organisations can transform a traditionally tedious and often inefficient task into a seamless experience for employees, managers and finance teams.

With the latest technological advances, expense management solutions equipped with smart receipt scanners can now perform tasks that, in a traditional setup, would often be done manually, such as automatic expense categorisation, fraud detection, and real-time policy checks.

If you work in an organisation where expenses are a burden, investing in a receipt scanner is no longer a luxury but a necessity. If you want to optimise your processes and boost efficiency, you can contact our team, and we’ll tell you all about our systems’ capabilities. It’s time to leap into the future and embrace technology so that expense management becomes so seamless that it feels like magic.