(Spoiler: we really like it.)
This week at TMT Towers we had a sole trader come to us with, yes, a shoe box stuffed with the year's receipts. (What's worse than a shoe box full of receipts? A shoe box with no receipts.)
Our options were to schedule out the income and expenditure manually in Excel (*yawn*) to to try something faster which would
(a) take less time for us and therefore
(b) cost the client less money
We looked into our bag of apps and pulled out 1tap from Receipt Bank. I know we've been banging on about the fully spec'd version of Receipt Bank for years, but this is a new app from them which has been created specifically for the sole trader user. Yes, it's a cut down so, yes, it's cheaper and doesn't have the full, rich functionality of it's bigger brother but for the kind of job we were looking at? It looked perfect.
Using 1tap
Using our in-house scanner (a Fuji iX500) we created a .pdf of the bills and receipts in the shoebox. 1tap will scan anything up to A4 size, which is considerably larger than the shoebox was.
Then we uploaded them to 1tap. We were amazed at the speed at which items were uploaded - transactions were being processed right before our eyes.
Next we looked at the invoices that this client had raised for their customers. Traditionally, this is where the Receipt Bank could add more value by extracting the sales data automatically (will be a feature in 2019) and we were delighted to see that this is already a feature of 1tap.
150 sales invoices in the scanner and uploaded in a matter of minutes, it seemed as though these were processed even more quickly than the receipts, possibly because they had a consistent lay out?
It took us less than an hour to upload all the data into 1tap. Now to check it.
Checking the extracted data
Nearly all the receipts had been extracted correctly, we only had to overwrite information on a handful. However, we found that the income invoices had a consistent issue in that the software was reading the deposit amount as the total rather than the actual total. We had to spend a little time to amend these errors. What's the take away? ALWAYS check the extracted data! (Or have your friendly, cloud-obsessed accountants do it for you.) We always double check; the majority of the time it's scarily spot on but, like any AI software, it still needs a human eye and a sense check.
Features we liked
As accountants and bookkeepers we also appreciated the feature that allows you to invite your accountant into the data that 1tap creates, allowing easy collaboration and ensuring everyone is working on the most up to date set of numbers.
We also discovered that in the accountant view we could go through the invoices and mark any that weren't allowed to be included in the profit calculation, (in this case mainly Capital expenditure).
We'd really like to see functionality to disallow a percentage of cost, for example, for this client the costs of their car for personal vs business journeys.
Verdict
We had a good experience using 1tap and our client was very impressed. We would recommend 1tap for non-VAT registered Sole Traders who only have to complete a Self-Assessment. We were especially impressed with the speed of upload and processing and also how easy it was to use and get the hang of.
However, if you need to complete a full set of accounts we'd still recommend the full version of Receipt Bank.
Special Offer
We think 1tap is a great app for Sole Traders and therefore we are offering the full 1tap Prime Max to new clients for only £50 per year, which represents a 50% saving.
We're so confident that it will transform the way we work together that if you're a Sole Trader using 1tap Prime Max we'll promise to complete your Self Assessment using data from 1tap for a fixed fee of £250.
(All pricing is quoted VAT exclusive)
To take advantage of this offer give us a call on 0117 325 8885 or drop us an email at hello@tmtaccounting.co.uk and we'll get you up and running. We've been helping our customers get the best out of cloud-based apps for the best part of 9 years now so we'll take the time to get you set up and running and be on hand to answer any questions you might have.
Tapping out....