Getting statements and receipts into one shape
A shoebox of fuel receipts photographed in a parking lot, a bank statement carrying six months of history, the same plumber invoice forwarded twice by different people at the client. Each arrival has to be classified, named to whatever convention that client agreed to, matched to a ledger and a period, and checked against the list of what should have arrived by now, which is how the missing December merchant statement gets noticed in January rather than at year end. Classification and naming are mechanical. Whether an invoice dated the last day of December belongs to December or belongs to January is not, so that one goes to a person with the document attached.
Everything is finished and the return still cannot be filed, because the signature authorisation has not come back.
The trial balance is the centre of this work, and most of the repeated labour is getting source material into a shape the trial balance can accept. Statements arrive as PDFs, receipts arrive as photographs, and bank data arrives through an aggregator that authenticates against a bank which changes its login flow without notice.
- Dext
- QuickBooks Online
- Xero
When this is the wrong thing to build
Pick something else if clients send everything by unencrypted mail regardless of what you have asked for. Until the portal or the request list changes that habit, intake automates the handling and the exposure stays exactly where it was. That is a data security problem before it is ever a workflow problem.
The constraint that shapes it
Tax return information is governed by a statute that makes disclosure or use outside preparation a criminal matter, with a parallel civil penalty, and consent has to be obtained in a prescribed form naming the recipient and the purpose. More on how this sector works.
A file arrives. The fields come back typed and checkable. Read what this shape is, or start from one of these.
- Reading dates out of a ratified contract
- Abstracting a commercial lease into dated fields
- Filling an MLS input sheet from the listing agreement
- Turning a docket entry into a calendar
- Turning a delivered transcript into a usable set of cites
- Coding a filing fee to the matter that will repay it
- How do I sort client receipts and statements into the right period?
- What is a good file naming convention for client source documents?
- How do I tell which bookkeeping documents are still missing for a month?
- Can bank statements be filed to the right client folder automatically?
- How do I stop a client sending me the same statement twice?
Back to accounting and bookkeeping, or see how this is priced and scoped.