Invoices and receipts typed in by hand.

Picture a trade or wholesale business with a few dozen suppliers. Invoices arrive as email attachments, as links to supplier portals and sometimes on paper with the delivery. Staff pay for fuel, parts and lunches on the company card and keep the receipts, or mean to. Once a month the owner, an office manager or the outside bookkeeper sits down and types each one into the accounting software: date, supplier, amount, tax, account, job.

The typing is only part of the cost. Receipts go missing, so card transactions sit unexplained. The same invoice gets entered twice because it was emailed and posted. Coding drifts, because the person entering it in March does not remember how the same supplier was coded in January. And while all of this waits for month end, nobody can say with confidence what was spent on a job last week.

Hiring help for data entry has become harder to justify as wages and payroll costs have risen, and bookkeepers increasingly charge for clean-up time when the source documents arrive late or incomplete.

Most accounting packages now include some receipt scanning, and dedicated capture apps exist. They are useful, but they usually read a document and stop there. Someone still has to forward every email, photograph every receipt in the app, pick the account and the job, and check for duplicates. If staff do not use the app, the receipts never arrive.

Outsourcing data entry moves the typing elsewhere without fixing the collection problem, and it adds a delay before the books are current. A shared inbox and a spreadsheet log works until the volume grows or the person who runs it is away.