I'm self employed: can I download and print my expenses for my accountant?

Hey

I’m self employed and I want an easy way to keep track of my expenses - I have an app already called 1tapreciepts. I noticed there was a feature to take photos of your receipts for your records but is there a place to download this information for accounting purposes?

Would be amazing and so handy if yes!

Thanks
Felicity

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Thanks, I’m following this topic! When it comes to doing my taxes next year it would be useful to download my statements. :slight_smile:

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You can export your transactions. If you’re on iOS that is, not sure about Android. Go to the spending tab and hit the share icon at the top right of the screen. You get two options, the current month or everything up to the current date. Then you get a further two options. A CSV or a QIF file.

Does that help?

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Receipt images are not currently bulk exportable, you can only manually export them by opening each one and using the occasionally almost invisible share button in the top right of the image view.

For transaction data, you can use the method @anon4562461 mentioned or a similar method going through search in the feed on iOS that allows more fine grain tuning of exactly what transactions get exported.

If you’re willing to code your own temporary solution, receipt images are accessible through the Monzo API as attachments to a transaction entry. I hope that in the future, at least some accounting software will write this kind of automated integration themselves.

Otherwise, the feature request stands! :+1:

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Hey @anon4562461 thanks for the reply. I can see you can download a spreadsheet detailing the transactions for the selected month/year however is there a way of linking in the photos of the receipts to this? For tax purposes you need proof of each transaction in the form of a receipt. I don’t really understand the function of taking a photo of the receipt for the app unless it’s used as evidence as an expense for a third party am I right?

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hey @RichardR cheers for the reply. I see, so you can only download specific reciepts one a time. Well in that case it would be an incredible feature to be able to make taxing that simple and to have the images downloadable into the same form as the other transactions. Or at least filed another way and named corresponding to the transaction codes. It would mean aswell you could control your company spends by only having a Monzo card which is solely for your company/business use. Monzo would be an incredibley useful tool for business if this feature was made!

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Tom was actually working on an app to manage this himself, back in January

but looking at the list of list of apps on GitHub, it looks like the project wasn’t published in the end :slight_frown:

Just to give you a heads up, Tom’s also been very clear that Monzo won’t build a lot of business functionality for the product

but this is obviously a feature that would benefit consumer users too…

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ah thanks @alexs this is great! Love it - would be so amazing if it did happen.

Totally understandable about making an actual business bank account, I’ve never had one so don’t know what it entails exactly but as a freelancer this function would be a total gamechanger.

Hopefully @tom will push this again in the future?

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There is a slightly quicker way to access lots of your receipts (although it’s not perfect & it’s a bit techy), rather than navigating to each them in the app…if you login to the developer site then go to the ‘playground’ and select List Transactions & click the Send button, you can get to the URL for each receipt, in a single feed…

search (ctrl + f) for ‘image’, then copy & paste the attachment’s file URL into a new tab in your browser

it’s fiddly but should save you having to email each image to yourself & you have the rest of the transaction details there too…each number is a new transaction. Bear in mind that the amounts are displayed in pence…

Do let us know how you get on, I’d like to know whether the site & formatting of the data is user friendly enough to be useable for this sort of thing…

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This is v techy but I managed to find the receipt photo I was looking for. Not sure how much easier that makes life in terms of collating expense data on a larger scale but definitely worth a think until I find of a better way to do it!

Thanks for taking the time for the detailed explanation.

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also lol @ looking like I spent £1600.00 in Franco Manca. Probably about that across the year though :pizza: :pizza: :pizza:

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I take it you’d recommend the place then?

It’s literally heaven. Please go

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Glad you found the receipt & thanks for the feedback, that’s good to know.

:see_no_evil:

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The nearest one for me is Broadgate.

Hi Folks

Just a quick note to say that I’m ask self employed and would be extremely keen to see some kind of system as explain by @tom above. Currently I use an app called receipt bank but it’s a bit clunky and this would be far more useful.

I’d be interested to know if HMRC actually need to see a receipt or if there are enough details in the transaction data. Does anybody know what the requirements are?

Thanks

Luke

So i’ve got a bit of an update on this - I realised my iphone has automatically made an album within my photos called ‘Monzo’ and the photos of the reciepts are stored all in there. I think this makes things so much easier!

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Also as far as I’m aware @Smith an accountant will need the transaction details and reciepts are needed on file to be able to be pulled as evidence if an audit is carried out on your account… But correct me if I’m wrong I am new to this too

It would be “Freelance / nomad delicious” for Monzo to work with 1-Tap receipt app - being able to give my accountant access and send it all to HMRC would be great for a ‘numb skull’ like me :wink:

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That sounds a lot like the concept that Tom discussed in this talk

where you’d be able to give your accountant / the app access to your Monzo data for x amount of time so that they can process it, through the API.

That would mean that 1-Tap would need to set up an integration with Monzo though & that can’t happen until the API gets to v1 & is opened up though :timer:.