Feature update: receipt vs. invoice recognition

If your expense management software can’t distinguish the difference between an invoice and a receipt, it can lead to inaccurate tax reporting, errors in your financial statements, and more manually intensive tasks for your finance team.

Invoices and receipts follow different processes. Invoices usually follow the accounts payable process, and receipts don’t. Invoices can amount to substantial amounts of money for companies, whereas receipts don’t usually equate to a large amount of money.

Why treat invoice and receipts separately

Receipts and invoices have different purposes. So, treating them the same way via your ERP and expense management software will become confusing and create issues in accounting and business operations.

The two differ in purpose, and you issue them at different times (before or after payment, respectively). Plus, invoices are usually VAT-able, and receipts generally aren’t.

The answer? Using smart expense management software with intelligent ERP integrations that categorise your invoices and receipts, saves time, and ensures accurate expense data.

A strong ERP integration is key for managing expense types

Using an expense management system that supports robust integrations with ERP systems like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and NetSuite is important.

Your ERP and expense management integrations must cater to your specific business processes for handling different expense types. Without a seamless integration, you're unnecessarily adding to your workload. As Nick Millard, VP of Finance at GDS Group, explained.

"Since we've implemented Payhawk, the benefits have been enormous. Before Payhawk, it used to be one person's full-time job to chase receipts, code up credit card statements to the P&L and manage the costs and credit cards."

At Payhawk, our ERP integrations with Microsoft Dynamics Business Central and NetSuite mean your expenses can be exported as journal entries, creating a clear differentiation between invoices and expenses for all enterprise customers.

Payhawk receipt vs. invoice recognition

Our OCR (optical character recognition) technology can now decipher the content of your document in more than 60 languages to determine whether you’re uploading an invoice or a receipt and auto-filling the field for you.

What does this mean? For a start, you can massively speed up your month-end close by eliminating manual work and supporting real-time reconciliations.

Not only that, but recent updates to our AI camera make receipt data collection even more straightforward, too. Simply scan the receipt or the invoice, and the technology extracts the data even more efficiently. That means dim lighting, low-quality ink, or crinkled paper no longer stand in your way when extracting important information.

Future-proofing accounting at Heroes with Payhawk’s NetSuite integration

Getting better control over company expenses was essential to the e-commerce company Heroes and was the driving force behind using a spend management platform:

"With Payhawk, we have an all-in-one solution that covers all areas backed by a super-strong product team. As a result, we can focus on what really matters for us as a fast-growing startup instead of wasting time on admin stuff," explains CFO Giancarlo Bruni.

"One reason we picked Payhawk was because of the accounting and ERP integrations. When we first started using Payhawk, we were still using Xero, and it was seamless. So, we trusted Payhawk to help us achieve the same with the NetSuite integration. We wanted everything to flow into the ERP and knew that Payhawk would be a true scaling partner in this way."

Read the Heroes customer story.

To sum up

If the spend management software you currently use can't automatically differentiate your invoices from receipts, or you rely on manual processes, then the Payhawk receipt versus invoice recognition feature could help you improve your accounting practices.

Even small changes to processes like this can empower you to streamline your business operations, take back valuable time, and improve accounting accuracy. Ready to see the feature in action? Book a demo today.