QuickBooks can do WHAT? Receipt Capture

We know that there are few things more anxiety-inducing than a shoebox full of receipts. Many QuickBooks ProAdvisors® have told us, “I wish my small businesses could scan their receipts like they do in QuickBooks Self-Employed.”

We heard you! Now, you and your clients can snap and store receipts digitally in QuickBooks® Online to save hours of labor throughout the year. Receipts are automatically categorized and matched to transactions, so everything’s organized and ready at tax time, with no shoebox in sight.

What can it do?

Where do I find it?

How do I use it? The ProAdvisor’s Guide

Additional Resources

What can it do?

What can’t it do? QuickBooks® allows you to batch reclassify transactions from one account or class to another. This comes in especially handy when many transactions were posted to the wrong account, or when you need to clean up large, uncategorized expense accounts.

Plus, thanks to feedback from ProAdvisors®, we’ve recently revamped Reclassify Transactions to help you be even more efficient. Collapsible columns, more specific filters, the ability to select multiple transactions, and a refreshing new design (yes, with lines that line up) make cleanup work easier than ever.

Where do I find it?

Receipt Capture is currently available to U.S. customers using all versions of QuickBooks Online: Simple Start, Essentials, Plus, and Advanced:

Banking > Receipts

How do I use it? The ProAdvisor’s Guide

Editor’s note: The content below is written by Stacy Kildal and cross-posted from stacyk.net.

Released in June 2019, Receipt Capture in QuickBooks Online allows users to directly upload receipts to the QuickBooks Online banking center where QuickBooks will read the receipt and either match to an existing transaction or allow users to add a new transaction.

There are three ways to add receipts:

• Email to a special Receipt Capture email.
• Drag/drop to the Receipts center.
• Take a picture using the QuickBooks mobile app.

Set up account to email receipts

The first thing we want to do is add senders; otherwise, the only people that will be able to email are the Master Admin and of the QuickBooks Online account and Accountant Firm users. We’ll need to go to Banking > Receipts > Manage senders.

For first use, you’ll be asked to register your email for Receipt Capture in QuickBooks Online. Because I was logged in as the Accountant Firm user, that email address connected this client’s QuickBooks Online account. It is possible to connect to multiple clients; in order to send to a different client, you need to toggle your Accountant user name to “off” in the active client account, switch to another client QuickBooks account, toggle your Accountant user on, and then send the email.

In the screenshot below, you see the Master Admin of the account and myself, the Accountant User. To add additional users, just click the “Add new sender” link as needed, choose from the list of current QuickBooks users, and click “Done” when you’re all set. Note: At the time of this writing, only current QuickBooks users with at least vendor only access may be added as sender.

Pro tip for Accountant Users: If you add yourself as a sender, it’s always specific to that client. A best practice is to remove yourself as a sender before adding yourself to another client, but if you forget to do that, it should default to the most recent QuickBooks subscription to which you’ve added yourself. My suggestion is to be diligent if you plan on adding yourself, or, like me, don’t add your Accountant User as sender, and just do drag/drop as a firm.

Using the Receipts center

Before we start adding receipts, let’s take a look at the Receipts center. If you’re familiar with QuickBooks Online bank feeds, you’ll feel right at home. We have a “For review” tab and a “Reviewed” tab. Here we have two receipts that have already been uploaded and added. We can click on the “Expense” link in the Linked Record column, or if necessary, we can choose “Undo add” in the Action column:

Clicking on the first receipt in the above screenshot, we can see the receipt attached:

Now, I want to show you how to add a receipt, as well as how you either manually add an expense and how cool it is when Receipt Capture matches an existing transaction.

We’ll start by emailing a receipt and manually. You can see here that it shows up in the Receipts center immediately, but it does take a few minutes for QuickBooks to read it:

While it’s processing, you can hover your mouse over it for a preview:

Once this was processed, I was able to quickly add the expense to QuickBooks Online. Again, here’s the expense transaction, showing the receipt attached to it:

Now, let’s do the drag/drop to match a transaction that I added specifically for this fake receipt I created just to write this article!

Here you can see it in the Reviewed tab in the Receipts center:

And here’s the original expense, with the receipt attached:

Take a picture using the QuickBooks Online Mobile App

In addition to emailing or dragging and dropping your receipts, you and your clients can also start the process in the QuickBooks Online mobile app. This is a super easy way to capture receipts on the go – before they start to pile up.

In the app, select “Receipt capture” to take a picture and upload it to QuickBooks. When you log in via desktop, your receipt will be waiting for you to review using the process above.

Additional Resources

• QuickBooks support article
• QBOShow interview about Receipt Capture in QuickBooks Online with QuickBooks Product Manager Rebecca Gilbert