Let's begin the first blog post of the new decade with a rant. I do try and be constructive towards the end, though, so bear with me.

I have the dubious honour of being responsible for spending a fair bit of "other people's money". Like many people, I file expenses at work - most months are fairly quiet, but sometimes I travel to London or abroad for conferences and client visits. And as regular readers will know, I'm also treasurer for various charities (well, just the one at the moment).

Naturally, in both cases, there has to be a receipt for every penny spent. In the business case, the auditors want to see 'em at year end, and you might also need to show them to HMRC if you want to offset your output VAT against your input VAT. (Oh, and the boss obviously needs them to sign off your expenses, though once you've reached the stage of being trusted with a corporate credit card, this is usually a rubber-stamping exercise).

Meanwhile on the charity side, the audit (or independent examination in simpler cases) will also need access to the supporting evidence for all outgoing payments.

In a perfect world, one would acquire receipts and file them away neatly as the transactions rack up. Thus, at the month/quarter/year end when the reckoning comes, you have them all to hand. Sadly this was rather easier in the good old days when 99% of the receipts were physical pieces of paper - you just fished them out of your wallet and stapled them together.

Now, though, e-mailed/electronic receipts are increasingly the norm, and most organisations large and small have moved to scanning even the paper ones and disposing of the originals. This ought to be progress, but it can turn pulling all those receipts together into a painful and long-drawn-out process.

There are two things we need to make this less painful:

  1. Companies should send invoices/receipts by e-mail. Don't send me an e-mail telling me I have a receipt, and forcing me to go download it from your portal (or even worse, tell me nothing and leave me to go and check). E-mailing me the object itself means that I can set up automatic rules to forward your e-mail to [email protected], or save them into the Dropbox folder where we keep these things. As it is, in far too many cases I end up having to wade through and download things at month end, which is time consuming and tedious.
  2. We desperately need some sort of standard for passing receipt information back via a card transation. In my ideal world, every transaction on the company card would beam all receipt information (vendor, items, VAT etc.) directly onto the entry in the expenses system, meaning all I have to do is a quick manual check before clicking submit. This is clearly within the relams of possibility, and I hope Visa, MasterCard and Amex are thinking very hard about how to make it happen.

Obviously, upgrading every point of sale system in the world ever to submit this sort of data is not a trivial task, but how about starting with payments processed by websites and other online services? No physical POS equipment to worry about, add an API call, sorted. Heck, start by sending just a PDF, forget about making it structured. Have a way for the card to tell compatible tills the e-mail address where it wants the receipt sending.

Here's hoping we see some movement on this in 2020, and this is one of the last times I spend a very dull hour dredging up the past year of receipts for the walking club from old e-mails etc.