Why We Built Receiptflow: The Accountant Who Got Sick of Typing

The renewal notice landed in my inbox sometime in 2023.

I remember staring at the number. Then reading it again. It was 8 times what I'd paid the year before. 8 times. For software that had been frustrating me and my team for years.

That was the moment I decided to build Receiptflow.

Not a grand plan. Not a startup epiphany. Just a number on a screen that made absolutely no sense and the realisation that I could do better.

Running a practice is a lot of things. Glamorous isn't one of them.

I'd been running my own accountancy firm since 2012. At our busiest, I had a team of 12 consisting of accountants, bookkeepers, people who cared about doing the job properly.

Receipts are unglamorous. Every accountant knows this. But they're also constant. Clients submit them late, in the wrong format, photographed at odd angles in bad lighting. Your team processes them, codes them, chases the ones that are missing, and corrects the ones that came through wrong.

It's not the interesting part of the job. But it takes up a disproportionate amount of time and if the tool you're using to manage it isn't up to scratch, that time multiplies fast.

I needed something that just worked. Fast, accurate, no faff. What I had was something else entirely.

The processing problem

The tool I was using promised to take the manual work out of receipts. In principle, that's exactly right. In practice, it meant watching receipts sit in a queue for hours.

Sometimes a full day.

When a client rings to ask whether something has been processed and your honest answer is "it's still queuing," that's not a great conversation. When you're managing that across a team of 12 and a full client roster, it becomes a genuine operational problem.

And if you wanted faster processing? You could pay extra for it. A premium tier, for the privilege of the software doing its job at a reasonable speed. I found that remarkable, honestly.

The accuracy problem

Slowness you can work around, to a point. Inaccuracy is harder to absorb.

A significant chunk of the receipts we submitted came back flagged for manual review. Which is fine, no software is perfect, and some receipts genuinely need a human eye. But when it's happening constantly, you start to wonder what you're actually automating.

Your team ends up checking things that should have sailed through. The software has moved the work rather than removed it.

Then there were the duplicates. The tool would miss real ones, actual duplicate submissions that should have been caught, while simultaneously flagging legitimate receipts as potential duplicates. You're cleaning up in both directions.

Vendor matching was its own problem. Instead of matching an incoming invoice to an existing supplier in your accounting software, it would create a new vendor. Every time. Your chart of accounts slowly filling up with near-identical duplicates that someone has to go and tidy up.

And email forwarding. Clients would forward invoices in, the system would appear to accept them, and then at reconciliation you'd discover they'd never actually arrived. Silently dropped. No error, no notification. Just gone.

The experience problem

The mobile app was important to us. A lot of our clients used it to submit receipts on the go - photograph it, done. It's the kind of frictionless experience that makes adoption stick.

Then the app got worse. Not dramatically, not overnight, but gradually more steps to do the same thing, features that used to be straightforward becoming harder to find. Clients who'd happily been using it started asking questions. That friction lands on your desk, not theirs.

The other thing that bothered me and this one is less about convenience and more about compliance was the absence of a clear audit trail. Who posted what to Xero, and when? For a practice managing client books, that's not a nice-to-have. It's something you need to be able to point to. The software didn't give us that.

The commercial problem

Here's the thing about a tool that's slow, inaccurate, increasingly frustrating to use, and built with features designed for businesses nothing like yours: you put up with it because switching is painful and the alternatives don't look obviously better.

I put up with it for years.

The product was built for everyone - large enterprise clients, global expense management, complicated multi-currency use cases. Meanwhile I was running a typical UK accountancy practice. Most of what I was paying for, I'd never used and never would.

Then the renewal arrived. 8 times the price. No meaningful improvement in the product. No explanation that made sense. Just a number that assumed I had nowhere else to go.

I did.

Start a free Receiptflow trial. No card required. See what receipt processing feels like when it's actually built for a UK practice.

What a UK accountancy practice actually needs

I spent a while thinking about what I actually wanted from this kind of software. Not what the brochure says. What a practice like mine and like most UK practices genuinely needs day to day.

The list isn't complicated:

Fast extraction. Not hours, not a queue, not a premium tier for speed. Seconds. You submit a receipt and it's done.

High accuracy. The whole point is to remove the manual work. If a third of submissions need human review, you haven't removed anything; you've just moved it.

Proper deduplication. Catch the real duplicates. Don't flag the legitimate ones. Match vendors to what's already in your accounting software rather than creating new ones every time.

Reliable document handling. If a client forwards an invoice, it arrives. If something genuinely needs attention, you get a notification. No silent failures discovered weeks later at reconciliation.

A clean mobile experience. Simple to use, consistent across updates, something clients actually adopt and stick with.

An audit trail. Who posted what, when. Basic, but essential for any practice managing client books.

And pricing that reflects what a practice actually uses, not what a global enterprise might need.

So we built it

Receiptflow is the tool I wished I'd had during those years.

Extraction takes seconds. Not hours, not a day - literally seconds! There's no queue, no premium tier for speed. Everyone gets fast because that's how it should work.

Accuracy is where I spent the most time getting things right. The goal was to make manual review the exception, not the routine. For clear, legible receipts we regularly achieve over 99% accuracy. Flagging is there when it's genuinely needed, not as a catch-all.

Duplicates are caught properly on both sides. Real duplicates get flagged. Legitimate receipts don't. Vendors are matched against what already exists in your accounting software rather than spawning new entries every time.

Email forwarding works reliably. If something needs your attention, you'll know. If it doesn't, it flows through without interruption.

The mobile app is clean and stays that way. No unnecessary clicks, no features buried under features. Clients use it because it's easy and it stays easy.

There's a clear audit trail. You can see exactly what was posted, when, and by whom. For a practice managing client books, that matters.

And the pricing is transparent. You can see exactly what you're paying, exactly what you're getting, and there are no surprises at renewal. Take a look at our pricing. It's on the page, in plain English.

We didn't build Receiptflow to compete on features. We built it to compete on doing the right things properly, for the kind of practice that makes up the vast majority of UK accounting. Firms that need something fast, clean, accurate, and fairly priced.

If that sounds like your practice, come and take a look.

Where we are now

Receiptflow is live, practices are using it, and the list of problems above is exactly why it exists.

I built it because I needed it. And because I knew that if I needed it, running a firm like mine for over a decade, then a lot of other practice owners probably did too.

If you're tired of slow processing, bloated software, and pricing that doesn't reflect what you actually use. Start a free trial today. No card required. See for yourself what it feels like when the tool just works.