Integration with ReceiptBank

Hi QuickFile team,

I was just wondering if there is any future pipeline to allow an API integration with ReceiptBank. Your Receipt Hub functionality is great however I have a client who has the best part of 200 receipts a month to fill in. - That’s 200 items where I have to identify the tax and the number and then allocate in your Receipt Hub. ReceiptBank does most of that for me.

My practice is fully going forward with using ReceiptBank as a Product - I would ideally like to use QuickFile as our preferred bookkeeping software (I use it for our Practice) however integration with ReceiptBank would be a significant benefit to us (and probably other firms/users out there).

Your Receipt Hub is definitely perfect for the low level user however high level users would certainly benefit from integration into these services.

Thanks

It may also be useful to ask Receipt Bank about integrating with Zapier. There’s a thread on this here as well.

Hi Richard,

I must confess, it’s not something we’re planning. If Receipt Bank integrate with Zapier this would certainly make it much easier to connect with them. And Zapier really is our long term strategy for integrations, developing native solutions is very complex and sucks up a lot of developer resources. Particularly in this case where we have a similar offering.

I’m not that familiar with Receipt Bank, however where do you feel it’s strengths are as a stand alone product?

Receipt bank can be used to enter purchase invoices into accounting system through scanning. It can move data cross to accounting system from scanned invoice. It can update purchase ledger, record bank payments and automate quite a lot of book keeping functions.

I know this is old now but not integrating with receiptbank is a big issue for me/my clients. I like the simplicity of Quickfile and would use it for all my clients if it integrated with Receiptbank.

Most of my bigger clients use receiptbank and I can’t move them over whilst Quickfile doesn’t work with it. I have one client I could move almost instantly if this were an option.

Let me know if there any plans to put this on the development list.

Hi @kewcumber

It’s not something on our development list I’m afraid. We do currently connect with many apps via Zapier, but I don’t believe Receipt Bank connects to Zapier.

It may be worth mentioning this to Receipt Bank directly. We’d be happy to help them (or anyone else for that matter) with integrations.

We’d be happy to explore the possibility of a Receipt Bank Integration. I have contacted Receipt Bank and we’ll see what can be done.

EDIT:

It would appear that any integration between ReceiptBank and QuickFile would need to be initiated by ReceiptBank. They would effectively need to push expenses into our system via our API. If there’s a willingness for ReceiptBank to set this up, we would do what we can to facilitate the integration process.

Ooh thanks, I have one client (with two businesses) that I’d move instantly if we could integrate with receiptbank.

Do you want me to approach receiptbank? It’s the only reason I don;t recommend Quickfile more to smaller and medium sized clients.

Hi @kewcumber. I think if we were able to start a dialogue with ReceiptBank this would be very helpful. Unfortunately at the moment there’s not a great deal we can do without some movement on the side of ReceiptBank.

Receipt bank is not so great any way, i have checked its functionality with Quick Books, it cannot handle CIS or any other deduction at source, i found it to be 75% accurate with other normaly invoices, many a times amunt wrong scanned, nominal codes wrong transfered, even that for example the scan on receipt bank says nominal code as purchases and while moving data to QB it went to some other code with wrong vat, after speaking to RB several time they say is QB fault not ours

I use it for several clients and find it to be 95% accurate but even at 75% accurate it would still save time inputting for me - I review everything quickly on RB before posting so pick up most errors. Mostly where there is an error it’s easy to see why - tax outside of normal VAT, totals not immediately obvious, new supplier so posted to the wrong code etc. Anyway it’s not relevant as I have checked with Receiptbank and they have no current plans to integrate with Quickfile.

@kewcumber do you know exactly how the matching is done? Is it fully automated via OCR or are they using some outsourced data entry team? How quickly is the matching done from posting the receipt?

They use OCR, time wise it can take from few minutes to few hours depends how large the file size of upload

It seems they actually use a combination of both OCR and human intervention. From a recent Quora post:

Hi there,

Helen from Receipt Bank here. At Receipt Bank we use OCR for data capture which is then supported by human verification. I hope that helps, please do get in touch at support@receipt-bank.com if you have any further questions.

Best Wishes, Helen

The OCR will just extract the blobs of text and then they most likely have an outsourced team that manually drag and drop the pertinent information into a set of boxes.

A little while back we experimented with doing something similar, we may well revisit this in 2017. Even if Receipt Bank had an open API (which is not the case right now), it would likely be more involving for us to implement a direct link with ReceiptBank rather than extend what we already have to allow for automatic parsing.

Yes I was going to say that I suspect a combination of both. Some are done within minutes and it’s very often the very clear ones so I suspect OCR there, others take a few hours. They occasionally have a slow down a couple of times recently where it’s taken 8-12 hours (perhaps staff shortages?) and they have emailed warning of the slow down.

As a minimum it might be helpful to have some form of OCR which can extract a supplier name and total amount and date and use previous invoice categories and tax rate to populate an invoice. So it would work for any supplier which has already one invoice. I would expect to review every invoice anyway (as I do with receiptbank) and the thing Receipt bank is least good at is determining an account code unless predetermined.

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I suspect 90% of the processing is done manually with ReceiptBank. If you run a receipt through OCR it will return a blob of unstructured text, if you have a receipt with sub totals then it’s very difficult to intelligently parse out the amounts, i.e. item totals, VAT, net and gross totals.

Even isolating the supplier name is a challenge, some receipts display a company logo rather than the actual company name. If you have any crinkles that skew the text, the OCR accuracy drops significantly, it’s a bit like how they use images of skewed text for the purpose of blocking robots, they are intended not to be machine readable.

It would be a nice feature to have, but I think for it to be useful we’d need to look at utilising some sort of back office team. Of course if Receipt Bank change their mind, we’d be happy to look at some form of integration too.

Datamolino is another player you might want to approach. I prefer them as I use them and Receiptbank on my Xero Account.

Both have their strengths and weaknesses but I bet you would have better luck working with Datamolino on getting them to create an API. there customer support much better.
They can also do Line Extraction on digitally produced invoices allowing you to automating the process for mixed invoices.

Once it is done I will probably be back on Quickfile. Xero is a bit rubbish and their support is practically nonexistent for small businesses.

Hi all,

Has anything developed since this original post at all?

I think OCR would be a great addition for QuickFile, so much so that if Dext (formerly ReceiptBank) won’t get involved, I would be happy to have a go at creating a web-based app. I know the components that are required to achieve this and, in conjunction with the QF API it shouldn’t be that difficult to achieve.

What are your thoughts?

Best Regards

Tom

Hi @tomhorton

Unfortunately no changes here, but you’d be more than welcome to develop a small app if you wish.

We do have an app marketplace - I’ve included some links below which should help.