Greetings, dear viewer or listener, and welcome to another episode of Elevated, the podcast all about helping you build a better kitchen and bath business through innovation and modernization. I'm your host, Brandi Lawson, lover of all things innovation and paper production. So far this season, we've covered a wide array of areas where AI can help you in running your business. One area we haven't yet touched on is finances. No better time to talk about how you can be leveraging the hottest bots to make managing your money even easier. In this episode, we'll cover how to use modern tools and approaches to manage receipt and expense tracking, mileage, and invoices. Two things people learn fairly quickly about me are, one, my adoration of ridiculous shoes, and two, my burning disdain for paper. This is likely due to one of my earliest jobs being to file for my parents business. Piles of paper meant a ton of work for me. My dislike runs so deep that CBS receipts may just be the most offensive thing I've ever seen. So, why does any of this matter? Well, in business, the money aspect of the organization typically involves the most paper. Invoices, receipts, bills, statements. Do you think accountants just hate trees? Or enjoy paper cuts? The whole thing is really confusing to me. At any rate, my hate for paper and obsession with efficiency come together to ensure that I'm always at the forefront of finding all the ways to reduce my contact with paper while ensuring that the business is still dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's for detailed financials and tax filings. Perhaps the largest paper offender is expenses and receipts. Yes, I get it. We need information about where the money goes, and that information typically comes in the form of a printed paper that gets handed to us at the time of the transaction. But that doesn't mean we have to keep the information in paper format. If you're getting paper receipts, the best thing to do is throw them in the trash. Well, right after you've snapped the photo. All modern smartphones have high enough camera quality that the photo of your receipt can be used by apps to aggregate your expenses. There are dozens of apps out there for receipt capture and expense management. But my top two are HubDoc and FileHQ. HubDoc is pretty much, as it sounds, a place to capture all your documents. You can forward emails to it, upload documents, or capture photos. It will then use Optical Character Recognition, OCR, to pull the information from the document so it can be easily categorized or matched with the expense. It integrates with QuickBooks and Xero, so matching transactions with the documentation is really easy. FileHQ is a good fit if you have multiple employees who submit expenses. File helps you collect receipts via text and automatically matches them to the right transactions. Users just text a picture of the receipt, file extracts the data, and then uses its AI to code the expense. If additional data is needed, the AI will prompt the user for that input via text. It integrates with the most popular bookkeeping software as well. If you're already using QuickBooks Online, you can use the mobile app for receipt capture. It appears to have some of the basic information extraction capabilities, but this functionality isn't as robust as other options. On the other hand, it is also an existing functionality of software you already use. Another area where AI can assist with your business finances is mileage tracking and classification. Thanks to GPS, your phone can record everywhere you go, so no need to keep, be keeping a mileage log notebook or jotting down sticky notes when you get out of the car. The app I use is called MileIQ, but other options include MileageWise or Timeiro. Each of these is an app you install on your phone, give permission to track your location. You then can set the usual stops or other parameters for it to auto classify drives for easy mileage tracking. If you drive a lot for business. Like an outside sales rep or customer service role, you might be interested in Everlace, which is an app that does both mileage tracking and expense management. One other area of finance that can cause angst and stress is invoicing. In the kitchen and bath design business, generating invoices can get complex, especially if you're doing more than just cabinetry. AI and innovation can simplify and streamline this. However, it takes more effort to implement this than using bots for expenses and mileage. To get automated invoicing, you first have to be using some kind of project management software. This is the data that will then be used to create the invoice line items. Creating automated invoicing can use any number of specific tools, apps, and methods, all depending on the other things you're currently using. So let's just discuss high level how this can work. As each item in the project management software is either created or reaches a certain status, that information can be added to a dataset that then gets put in the next invoice. Then, when a specific task reaches a specific state, or when a project is marked as a certain status, the invoice can trigger to be created and sent, or even just drafted for a human to review and send. As you can see from our discussion in this episode, there's no need to compile reams of receipts, keep a mileage log book, or even sweat creating invoices when you fully employ AI and automation. In the next episode, we'll walk through a specific scenario on how to best use these kinds of apps while traveling for business. Like what you heard? Never miss an episode by subscribing! 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