Expenses: Food and Transport

Accounting
1

Hi, I hope someone can help me with my questions.
I need to manage the following expenses, Transport (London oyster card) and food (lunch ie. from M&S or Tesco) as I will be working at my client’s premises for a while. I cannot claim VAT because there is not VAT to claim in the first place with such expenses. As limited company I will use these costs as deduction from the profits (my client won’t reimburse them to me). I am the director of the company in case this would be relevant to your responses.
These are day to day expenses, I am expecting to have a lot of them and their value varies from £1.5 to £4.5. I started to scan theses receipts with my mobile (cam scanner), and send them to quick file via The Receipts Hub. I also import my transactions to Quick File with the bank feed plugin.
I have the following questions:

  • On Quick file, the same transactions are appearing in both my Bank Statement and in the Receipt Hub, which one I should use to tag the transaction? If I am using one I should delete the other? Also the process looks different to me, which one is the best one for my type of expenses?
  • Which category I should use for the Food? The food is not in the category’s list and Quick File says that food (lunch) is not a business expenses. I was told by my accountant that in my case I can report my Lunch as business expenses. I am now confused, please can someone clarify?
  • Do I need to create a new purchase entry in Quick File even if there is not VAT involved? The reason why I am asking this is that it seems a quite long work every day to create several new entry purchases for such a small amount. Can anyone advise on how to manage this?
    Many Thanks in advance.
    Mat
2

You do both, or at least it’s the way that I do it. In the receipt hub you are just entering the details from the receipt, you can tag it from there but you need to make sure there is a matching entry in your bank account already otherwise QF will create one, which will then be duplicated when you import your statements. I just tag the receipts and leave them as unpaid, then tag the payments all from the bank screen.

You still need to account for where the money is going whether VAT is involved or not.

As for the amount of receipts you have, you could just lump all these under one generic receipt/purchase invoice, e.g. you spend £1.50 a day on dinner for 5 days so just enter a £7.50 purchase at the end of the week.

3

Thanks Lurch for your response.

It seems to me white a lot of work to do. Because my bank account is linked to quick file each transaction will generate a new invoice which is something I would like to avoid.

I will pay these kind of expenses with my personal card an create an unique invoice on quick file each month and make a refund to my personal bank account. This is the easiest and quicker way at the moment with quick file.

Thanks anyway.

Mat

4

You can still do it with 1 bulk invoice, rather than tagging everything from the bank to individual invoices you can tag it as part payment of the bulk invoice. You can also set up autotagging rules so you don’t actually have to do anything in the future.

5

Thanks Lurch,

You are right but I would like not to generate a purchase invoice for each transactions considering the small amount and the number of transactions involved. I tried the bulk invoice feature but it generates separate invoices. I was wondering if there is a system, like the bulk invoice feature, that would only generate one invoice from 20-30 transactions. Thanks

6

I have been doing this for transport, for example scanning in all the weeks bus dockets and entering those. But if a ball ache but i can see what is what that way