Accounting firms: when every receipt arrives by email
Start of the month, a full inbox, PDFs and phone photos. What is repetitive in this work, what takes expertise – and how to separate the two.
One of the most familiar moments in an accounting firm is the start of the month. Clients all send their documents at once: some as tidy PDFs, some as a pile of receipts photographed on a phone, some in five separate emails from three different addresses.
What is repetitive about this work?
Before anything can be booked, the same thing happens to every document:
- who sent it and which client it belongs to,
- what kind it is (incoming invoice, outgoing invoice, bank statement, receipt, contract),
- its key data (counterparty, date, amount, delivery date),
- whether anything is missing for the month.
This part takes no accounting expertise, but a great deal of attention – which is exactly why it is tiring. If a firm receives dozens of these emails a day, it adds up to hours.
What takes expertise?
Whether a cost is deductible, which ledger account it goes to, whether the client needs to send something else – that is the accountant’s work, and it stays that way. A good division of labour lets the machine do the preparation so the expert decides on organised material.
Three things you can introduce tomorrow
- A dedicated submission address for clients (for example receipts@…). If everything goes there, nothing gets lost in personal inboxes.
- A simple subject-line rule: client name + month. Not everyone will follow it, but it helps a lot.
- A checklist per client: what usually arrives every month. That way you notice sooner when something is missing.
Where does a tool like Sortio help?
Sortio reads the incoming email and its attachments, recognises the client and the document type, extracts the key data, and shows it in the inbox: this is fine, check this one, something is missing here. It drafts the request for missing documents too – you send it. The bookkeeping itself stays with the accountant.
