380 receipts, 1,140 decisions, and the accounting has not even started.
Receipts arrive as photos, as PDFs attached to emails and as paper in a folder, spread over the year and in no particular order. Before any figures are entered, each one has to be opened, assigned to a property, a category and a year, and filed. Name a category differently in March and in October, and you sort everything again in January.
380receipts a yearTradesmen's invoices, service charge statements and small receipts come in over twelve months.
3decisions per receiptProperty, category and year are settled for every single receipt.
1,140individual decisionsOnly then can the tax specialist start the work they are trained for.
29free-text labelsWithout a fixed list, the same thing ends up with twenty-nine spellings that later have to be merged by hand.
A fixed vocabulary removes the twenty-nine spellings for the same thing, and with them 60% of the sorting effort, before the tax specialist opens the first receipt.
The 60% reduction in sorting effort is this agent's headline figure. The 380 receipts and the twenty-nine free-text labels describe a year for a client with several properties; they were not counted.