FreeAgent’s award winning accounting software is used by over 150,000 small businesses and landlords to monitor their business finances, record expenses and create invoices. We recommend it to our clients because it allows you to monitor your cash flow from any device, and means your accountant always works using up to date information. In this article, we’re looking at the new smart capture feature; here’s what you need to know.
What is smart capture?
Smart Capture automatically extracts the date and amount from your receipts as you save a photo of them into FreeAgent.
Matching receipts to bank transactions
If there’s a corresponding Money Out bank transaction waiting for approval with the same date and value, Smart Capture will attach the receipt to it.
If no corresponding transaction exists, FreeAgent will check every 24 hours for seven days. The bank transaction must be dated between the receipt date and two days later in order to be matched with it.
If there isn’t a matching bank transaction
If there isn’t a matching bank transaction because the expense was not paid out of your business account, you can convert the file into an out-of-pocket expense. A new out-of-pocket expense will be created with the file as an attachment. The date, total value and a suggested category may be added into the relevant fields of the ‘Expense details’ section automatically and highlighted in blue with a lightning bolt symbol.
Creating an expense
As part of a new release in November 2023 FreeAgent added a new automation which allows you quickly convert a photo of a receipt into an expense, with the date, amount and appropriate category automatically assigned. This will save you time and decrease the number of errors by reducing manual entry of data.
System requirements
Smart Capture is available in the FreeAgent mobile app on devices running IOS 15 or later, and Android 7.0 (Nougat) operating system or later.
Supported files
You can upload files in .jpg, .jpeg, .pdf and .gif. Each one can be up to 5MB in size, and you can store up to 1GB of files in total.
How many receipts can you scan?
You can use Smart Capture to extract the date and amount from 10 files per month on your free FreeAgent account. If you need to use it for more than 10 receipts per month, Smart Capture Unlimited is available for purchase as an add on.
Once you’ve used your monthly allowance, you can still capture additional files, but the date and value won’t be extracted, and the file won’t be automatically matched with a bank transaction.
If you have questions or if we can help in any way, please call our expert team on 01296 468483 or email info@orangegenie.com.