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Processing receipts manually is time-consuming, inefficient and tedious; no one pursues a career in accounting to spend their time sorting through piles of paper, entering data into software and chasing up missing information.
Doing this also drives up clients’ bills, lowers your margins and reduces your firm's ability to scale client volumes. That’s why we’ve built a number of features into our software that help accountants and clients deal with their receipts much more quickly and efficiently—all in one place.
How Coconut helps you digitise your services
Coconut gives you the tools to have your sole trader and unincorporated landlord clients handle the capture of expenditure and income themselves, using the Coconut smartphone app. This removes the time-consuming work of uploading and entering receipt information from your desk, so you can focus on value-added work for your clients.
- With Coconut, your clients can take pictures of receipts and upload them directly.
- Once uploaded, Coconut will capture the information: total amount, date of the transaction, merchant.
- Based on this information, where possible, Coconut automatically suggests a matching transaction from your client’s bank feed. This can easily be amended should the need arise.
- If there are any remaining receipts, e.g., for cash purchases, it’s easy to create new transactions from the receipts and link the two in seconds.
- It’s a simple step to edit existing receipts, including the transaction they're attached to.
Here's the Receipts Tool in action:
Why rapid receipt processing matters
One of the traditional challenges of working with sole traders and unincorporated landlords is making the margins work—these clients’ fees are usually lower than they are for limited companies, meaning that any manual tasks can quickly eat into your firm’s profits. Coconut gives you the tools to empower your clients to handle this task directly, easily and in a collaborative way.
- Save your clients’ time: Instead of your clients having to save, organise and deliver paperwork to you, you can help them spend more time where it matters by giving them simple tools to manage their own bookkeeping by issuing invoices and capturing receipts in Coconut.
- Bring your services into real time: Upload receipts on a regular basis—with clients taking pictures as soon as they make a purchase you can track their expenses in real time to offer a true picture of their cash position.
- Breeze through Self Assessment: By capturing data throughout the year, you can eliminate the end of year crunch, with no shoeboxes in sight.
- One app with everything you need: You only need one simple, easy to use app to capture, store, analyse and manage your clients’ data, so there’s no extra training, cost or onboarding time.
- Offer more valuable services: By spending less time on data entry, you can spend more time actually working with your clients based on reliable, real-time data.
- Accelerate Making Tax Digital compliance: Our receipt capture tools help you digitise your clients’ records quickly and easily, making digital records simple and removing any need for time consuming photocopying—meaning you'll be ready when MTD ITSA comes into effect in 2026.
Now is the time to evolve your firm
Coconut can now automate some of the mosttime-consuming aspects of managing your sole trader and landlord clients,opening the door to huge changes for your firm. You can use the time saved totake on more clients, offer new services or just get out of the office earlierwhen it matters most.
To find out how Coconut can make it easier todigitise even your smallest clients, you can book a short demo with our team. We’ll show you how the platform and the app work for capturing andmanaging receipts and answer your specific questions about how you can workbetter with your clients.
Alternatively, you can sign up for a free Coconut Partner Account, and explore the full Coconut Platform at your leisure.
