How to Say Goodbye to Your Clients’ Shoebox of Receipts

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

Our new features let you automate the time-consuming work of uploading and entering receipt information, so you can focus on value add work for your clients.

• With Coconut, you can take pictures of receipts and upload them directly from the Accountant Platform. You can also upload receipts in bulk—just drag and drop them all in one from your computer.
• Once uploaded, our software will capture the information: total amount, date of the transaction, merchant.
• Based on this information, where possible, we’ll automatically suggest a matching transaction from your client’s bank feed. Don’t worry, you’ll always have the chance to approve this step.
• If there are any remaining receipts, e.g. for cash purchases, you can easily create new transactions from the receipts and link the two in seconds.
• You can also 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’s new tools are designed to help you offer profitable, efficient, value driven services to your smallest clients, all year round.

• 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.  
• 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 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 management, 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 most time-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 to take on more clients, offer new services or just get out of the office earlier when it matters most.

To find out how Coconut can make it easier to digitise 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 and managing receipts and answer your specific questions about how you can work better with your clients.

Alternatively, you can sign up for a free Coconut Partner Account, and explore the full Coconut Platform at your leisure.