Your tiers differ by the number of users and bank statement transactions. What does "bank statement transactions" mean exactly? Is it the number of receipts + bank statements sent to Spark Receipts each month?
Bank statement transactions refer to the amount of transaction lines that can be extracted from PDF/Excel/CSV statements and converted into expenses (or income) using the dedicated bank statement line extraction AI. Receipt scans remain unlimited.
The same credit system will be used for future features such as receipt line item scanning, but details are not yet set in stone regarding that.
Are you planning to include in the app the updated balances of each bank account or card from which expenses are paid and where we deposit income? In order to always have all the updated and totaled balances in the app every time we record an income or expense?
Do you plan to add a budget feature? One that does not impact results unless expenses are consolidated. This is a very important and useful feature for personal, family, and business expense projections. Please add this feature! It would be a game changer if we can set budgets before we actually make the expense. Additionally, it would be helpful to have a report showing both projected and executed expenses.
This is definitely included in our current vision for the product. Just like other tools to help with freelancers' and SMBs' expense management such as a mileage tracker, invoice collection and perhaps simple invoicing features will most likely be included in the future. But only time will tell what the final direction for the product is. We will shape this depending on feedback, surveys, churn tracking and e.g. what is required for custom deals with accounting agencies. Etc etc. Lots of opportunities but limited resources. At least for now. :)
Q: A couple working in the same business, same bank account would need 2 seats or 1 is enough?
2. And for the couple to each install the mobile app on their phone, does it also require 2 seats? Or could the one app be installed on 2 phones with shared login?
3. To share data with accountant, does it require one extra seat for the accountant?
I'm trying to figure out If I would need just 1, 2 or 3 seats Thanks!
In this scenario you would require 2 seats. Accountant is included so a third is not needed. The shared login scenario can be considered as seat limit circumvention, and while we don't currently have strict measures against it, for the best experience with the system overall I would highly advise you to use separate accounts for tracking! :)
Thanks Antti, I don't mind paying for 2 accounts. I just don't want the Sparkreceipt system confused in treating my wife and I as being 2 different employees in the business. Each of us generating and processing our own separate expenses in our own name. In reality it's my wife's business. She is the only employee (solopreneur). I only intend to help her out with that pre-accounting admin stuff.
Ok. The space here is limited so we can continue this in the support chat if needed. But you don't strictly need to use the per-user reporting or filtering features. The app will display the expenses being submitted by you, but you can (with right permissions) also help out and edit your wife's expenses. Or if you mean separating your expenses, that is possible with linked accounts.
- Antti
Q: Tier 10 and users
Hi,
Happy to bought Tier 10 with 10 seats but got confused on the display of number of seats available and the Credit. Was down from 3,000 to 2,100 now after 3 members accept the invitation. How it works?
That is actually a display error when using Linked Accounts and some of the seats are in use within a subaccount. It does not affect the functionality or the amount of credits, and this is an oversight in the application UI. I will fix it as soon as possible. If that is not the case, please ensure all 10 codes are redeemed and be in touch with me at support@sparkreceipt.com.
So with 10 seats you will get 3000 monthly credits, shared across all your linked subaccounts.
Hi, the renewable credits display got fixed but the seats still display as "Seats not allocated to another linked account". But the actual seat count you can use across the linked accounts is still correct (as a total of 10).
Q: Can this tool retrieve invoices from mailboxes (like gmail) and portals (amazon)?
Not yet, but by combining other tools such as Wellybox and GetMyInvoices / Vuala (had an LTD a while back too) this has been done. It is definitely a product direction we want to support in the future as well. Just requires a bit of resources since it will be a full blown project in itself.
Q: Is there an easy way to use only a percent (%) of an expense?
For example, only want to use 50% of my cell phone expenses for my business because it is 50% personal use and 50% professional use. The only way I could do it now, it seems, is by manually halving the amount.
Right now, that is correct. We have however planned tools for e.g. splitting and merging expenses, as they are definitely really useful features. For the phone bill case, which is really common I would say a percentage split tool would be best, with an option to transfer the personal part to a subaccount or discard it depending on the use case.
Right now we only have Quickbooks fully integrated. Xero is super requested and will be there as soon as more critical things are tackled. Sage is a good third option to consider. It all depends in which of the planned features we find the best traction to get a good foothold into the market.
Sending emails about scanned expenses is not possible on an individual level, unless you use the share options in the mobile app. This will of course allow you to share the image / PDF to e.g. Gmail and send an email, but this is not automated in any way at this time.
This is what I would get this for so it's a bummer that's not supported. I barely get paper receipts for ANYTHING anymore. In the US I would say one out of every one hundred transactions provides a paper receipt. Just some food for thought since I was considering buying this but can't now since it doesn't cater to a tremendous use case.
Hi, I think you misunderstood. The original question was about sending out emails for each added document. So whenever they would scan a receipt, an email would be sent outward for further automation. This is currently only possible via webhooks.
For scanning receipts into SparkReceipt, we support paper receipts, PDF files and emailed receipts (via manual or automatic forwarding).
Best, Antti
Q: Hello, this is a great app! I have a question:
Do you plan to add a budget feature? One that does not impact results unless expenses are consolidated. This is a very important and useful feature for personal, family, and business expense projections. Please add this feature! It would be a game changer if we can set budgets before we actually make the expense. Additionally, it would be helpful to have a report showing both projected and executed expenses.
Sure! You will preferably need 7 seats (you + 6 drivers). Create an account, then add the employees with the "contributor" role so they can submit their receipts, but they don't see each other's receipts.
Then you can create an Excel / CSV report for each one with a custom report to see the individual totals. Or, if you prefer to work directly in Excel then you can also generate a report that includes everything, and use the tools in Excel to group the sums using the "submitted by" column.
Hello, is there a tutorial on how excactly I can separate my business expenses from my personal ones? Does it work just with tags or do I have to make a completely new account? I love the product so far but I can't figure this one out.
To achieve this look at the Linked Accounts feature. It is found under Account Settings on web and in the main drawer menu on mobile.
When you create new accounts from that view, then you'll have completely separate spaces for personal & business (or multiple businesses or whatever is your use case).
And when you have those multiple accounts, you can use the quick selection menu to switch between them, which can be found in the sidebar (top left) in the web app and on the top right of the main view of the mobile app.
You have one preferred currency (home currency) and receipts in other currencies are then converted to that with the transaction date's market rate.
While the free version has access to most features, it is limited to 15 scans per month, making it mainly suitable for very simple businesses, side hustles and e.g. part-time freelancing needs.
This is not yet supported for paper OCR, but digital text in the form of PDFs, CSVs etc can be read. We rely on the Google MLKit Vision for the image OCR and we support new scripts whenever the library gets updated. Currently it supports all latin variant languages, both Chinese variants, Japanese and Indian Devanagari scripts.
Can you provide some context in the accuracy of this function. Can it extract debit and credit transactions independent of the balance on the statement?
A: The exact accuracy is highly dependent on the quality of the input. Banks seem to be notoriously bad at generating PDFs that conform to the official PDF standard but we do our best to normalize them and fix any issues with them before sending it to the AI.
It can extract both credit and debit transactions, and here again the accuracy is the best when the statement contains explicit plus and minus signs in the sums, and I would be more careful if the data is in e.g. "Money in" and "Money out" tabs, as the internal PDF data rarely reflects this layout accurately. The AI is very good at deducing even in this case, but not correct 100% of the time.
Please clarify what you mean by Bank statement transactions and bank statement extraction? Does the SparkReceipt pull the bank transactions from connected bank accounts and credit cards?
Does it do at least basic reports of expenses to be used for taxes? Recognizes GST? etc... How do you compare to Wave accounting which works really well especially for us Canadians? I really am not keen on seating all day and scan receipts manually and rather have the transactions pulled., automatically categorized and accounted like in Wave.
The bank statement extraction refers to the ability to scan any PDF or CSV bank statements (so not direct pulls from bank feeds, which is on the roadmap). It uses AI to take any format statements and output the transaction lines.
It recognizes GST, VAT and PST (for Canada), and is able to do Excel, CSV and PDF reports with this information.
Wave Accounting is regional and available to only US and CA businesses, so I am not super familiar with it and what it can actually do. Seems like a well-liked and good software. One main difference is that we are not trying to do accounting (yet), and focus more on collecting and categorizing the materials for accounting - with some basic expense and income tracking tools and reporting built in. Receipt and invoice scanning is super essential for most businesses, since a digital transaction from bank feed alone is not enough proof for audits in most countries.
We don't really do any paper statements anymore in Canada. All is digital in online banking...
And about comparing to Wave (besides not able to pull the transactions)? and tbout the reports for the income tax preparation? Sales taxes calculations?
I get it. We don't do paper statements here in Finland either, but this initially a feature requested by our smaller accounting customers that needed help sorting out paper material with AI. We can do digital banking transactions with Plaid with relatively low effort, and will do it - but at an early stage we need to look at underserved segments to gain a foothold and expand from there.
2/2 And the app can do pretty comprehensive reports in Excel with various tax breakdowns (for example GST+PST in Cadana, or breakdown by VAT tiers in EU and elsewhere). Cannot of course guarantee they are exactly in the format what is required for each country's needs. However we are actively listening to feedback on this and are quick to add these required fields as the needs arise.
Best, Antti
Q: Separate businesses?
If I buy for example 5 or 10 codes... can I separate the usage credits between different businesses I own?
Can I use this for invocies in Swedish too? Or only english?
The credits are shared between all your subaccounts for different businesses, so if you e.g. have a 1000 credits total you can use them in any account linked to you. The AI can read Swedish invoices fine, SEK is a fully supported currency and the dot-based date format in Sweden (dd.mm.yyyy) is also supported both in display and in data extraction.
Q: Bank statement trascations?
Your tiers differ by the number of users and bank statement transactions. What does "bank statement transactions" mean exactly? Is it the number of receipts + bank statements sent to Spark Receipts each month?
Antti_SparkReceipt
Dec 17, 2024A: Hi,
Bank statement transactions refer to the amount of transaction lines that can be extracted from PDF/Excel/CSV statements and converted into expenses (or income) using the dedicated bank statement line extraction AI. Receipt scans remain unlimited.
The same credit system will be used for future features such as receipt line item scanning, but details are not yet set in stone regarding that.
Best,
Antti
Share SparkReceipt
Q: Any plans on returning to AppSumo?
Share SparkReceipt
Q: Balances of each Bank account or Card
Are you planning to include in the app the updated balances of each bank account or card from which expenses are paid and where we deposit income? In order to always have all the updated and totaled balances in the app every time we record an income or expense?
Antti_SparkReceipt
Dec 16, 2024A: Hi,
This sounds like a request to integrate with bank feeds. It is planned via Plaid or a similar platform, ideally with a bit better EU coverage.
Best,
Antti
Share SparkReceipt
Q: Budget feature
Do you plan to add a budget feature? One that does not impact results unless expenses are consolidated. This is a very important and useful feature for personal, family, and business expense projections. Please add this feature! It would be a game changer if we can set budgets before we actually make the expense. Additionally, it would be helpful to have a report showing both projected and executed expenses.
Antti_SparkReceipt
Dec 16, 2024A: Hi,
This is definitely included in our current vision for the product. Just like other tools to help with freelancers' and SMBs' expense management such as a mileage tracker, invoice collection and perhaps simple invoicing features will most likely be included in the future. But only time will tell what the final direction for the product is. We will shape this depending on feedback, surveys, churn tracking and e.g. what is required for custom deals with accounting agencies. Etc etc. Lots of opportunities but limited resources. At least for now. :)
Best,
Antti
Share SparkReceipt
Q: Any plans to integrate with Freshbooks?
Antti_SparkReceipt
Dec 14, 2024A: Hi,
Hard to guarantee at this stage. If we at some point go on an ”integration spree”, then maybe. But there are e.g. Xero and Sage on the list before it.
Best,
Antti
Share SparkReceipt
Q: 3 Code
Is it 900 credits per user ?
Antti_SparkReceipt
Dec 14, 2024A: Hi,
No, it is the total amount for the whole account.
Hope this helps.
Best,
Antti
Share SparkReceipt
Q: A couple working in the same business, same bank account would need 2 seats or 1 is enough?
2. And for the couple to each install the mobile app on their phone, does it also require 2 seats? Or could the one app be installed on 2 phones with shared login?
3. To share data with accountant, does it require one extra seat for the accountant?
I'm trying to figure out If I would need just 1, 2 or 3 seats
Thanks!
Antti_SparkReceipt
Dec 12, 2024A: Hi,
In this scenario you would require 2 seats. Accountant is included so a third is not needed. The shared login scenario can be considered as seat limit circumvention, and while we don't currently have strict measures against it, for the best experience with the system overall I would highly advise you to use separate accounts for tracking! :)
Best,
Antti
Share SparkReceipt
Thanks Antti,
I don't mind paying for 2 accounts. I just don't want the Sparkreceipt system confused in treating my wife and I as being 2 different employees in the business. Each of us generating and processing our own separate expenses in our own name. In reality it's my wife's business. She is the only employee (solopreneur). I only intend to help her out with that pre-accounting admin stuff.
Hi,
Ok. The space here is limited so we can continue this in the support chat if needed. But you don't strictly need to use the per-user reporting or filtering features. The app will display the expenses being submitted by you, but you can (with right permissions) also help out and edit your wife's expenses. Or if you mean separating your expenses, that is possible with linked accounts.
- Antti
Q: Tier 10 and users
Hi,
Happy to bought Tier 10 with 10 seats but got confused on the display of number of seats available and the Credit. Was down from 3,000 to 2,100 now after 3 members accept the invitation. How it works?
Antti_SparkReceipt
Dec 2, 2024A: Hi,
That is actually a display error when using Linked Accounts and some of the seats are in use within a subaccount. It does not affect the functionality or the amount of credits, and this is an oversight in the application UI. I will fix it as soon as possible. If that is not the case, please ensure all 10 codes are redeemed and be in touch with me at support@sparkreceipt.com.
So with 10 seats you will get 3000 monthly credits, shared across all your linked subaccounts.
Best,
Antti
Share SparkReceipt
Verified purchaser
Wow! Didn't expect such prompt reply to the question. Bravo! Thank you.
Verified purchaser
problem fixed? still dont see my 10 seats
Hi, the renewable credits display got fixed but the seats still display as "Seats not allocated to another linked account". But the actual seat count you can use across the linked accounts is still correct (as a total of 10).
Q: Can this tool retrieve invoices from mailboxes (like gmail) and portals (amazon)?
Antti_SparkReceipt
Dec 12, 2024A: Hi,
Not yet, but by combining other tools such as Wellybox and GetMyInvoices / Vuala (had an LTD a while back too) this has been done. It is definitely a product direction we want to support in the future as well. Just requires a bit of resources since it will be a full blown project in itself.
Best,
Antti
Share SparkReceipt
Q: Is there an easy way to use only a percent (%) of an expense?
For example, only want to use 50% of my cell phone expenses for my business because it is 50% personal use and 50% professional use. The only way I could do it now, it seems, is by manually halving the amount.
Thanks!
Antti_SparkReceipt
Dec 10, 2024A: Hi,
Right now, that is correct. We have however planned tools for e.g. splitting and merging expenses, as they are definitely really useful features. For the phone bill case, which is really common I would say a percentage split tool would be best, with an option to transfer the personal part to a subaccount or discard it depending on the use case.
Best,
Antti
Share SparkReceipt
Verified purchaser
That would be awesome, love your product so far!
Q: Does this have sage integration?
Antti_SparkReceipt
Dec 10, 2024A: Hi,
Right now we only have Quickbooks fully integrated. Xero is super requested and will be there as soon as more critical things are tackled. Sage is a good third option to consider. It all depends in which of the planned features we find the best traction to get a good foothold into the market.
Best,
Antti
Share SparkReceipt
Q: Crazy ?- When I scan some docs like expense
I need to save them and email them!! When I scan , can I email to myself of others ??
Antti_SparkReceipt
Oct 28, 2024A: Hi,
Sending emails about scanned expenses is not possible on an individual level, unless you use the share options in the mobile app. This will of course allow you to share the image / PDF to e.g. Gmail and send an email, but this is not automated in any way at this time.
Best,
Antti
Share SparkReceipt
Verified purchaser
This is what I would get this for so it's a bummer that's not supported. I barely get paper receipts for ANYTHING anymore. In the US I would say one out of every one hundred transactions provides a paper receipt. Just some food for thought since I was considering buying this but can't now since it doesn't cater to a tremendous use case.
Hi, I think you misunderstood. The original question was about sending out emails for each added document. So whenever they would scan a receipt, an email would be sent outward for further automation. This is currently only possible via webhooks.
For scanning receipts into SparkReceipt, we support paper receipts, PDF files and emailed receipts (via manual or automatic forwarding).
Best,
Antti
Q: Hello, this is a great app! I have a question:
Do you plan to add a budget feature? One that does not impact results unless expenses are consolidated. This is a very important and useful feature for personal, family, and business expense projections. Please add this feature! It would be a game changer if we can set budgets before we actually make the expense. Additionally, it would be helpful to have a report showing both projected and executed expenses.
Share SparkReceipt
Q: I’d like to use this software to track 6 truck drivers daily receipts.
They each typically get 5-10 a day. I add up the daily tickets to pay them accordingly.
Can this app accommodate this type of thing?
Antti_SparkReceipt
Dec 6, 2024A: Hi,
Sure! You will preferably need 7 seats (you + 6 drivers). Create an account, then add the employees with the "contributor" role so they can submit their receipts, but they don't see each other's receipts.
Then you can create an Excel / CSV report for each one with a custom report to see the individual totals. Or, if you prefer to work directly in Excel then you can also generate a report that includes everything, and use the tools in Excel to group the sums using the "submitted by" column.
Hope this helps.
Best Regards,
Antti
Share SparkReceipt
Q: Separating Personal and Business expenses
Hello, is there a tutorial on how excactly I can separate my business expenses from my personal ones? Does it work just with tags or do I have to make a completely new account?
I love the product so far but I can't figure this one out.
Antti_SparkReceipt
Dec 4, 2024A: Hi,
To achieve this look at the Linked Accounts feature. It is found under Account Settings on web and in the main drawer menu on mobile.
When you create new accounts from that view, then you'll have completely separate spaces for personal & business (or multiple businesses or whatever is your use case).
And when you have those multiple accounts, you can use the quick selection menu to switch between them, which can be found in the sidebar (top left) in the web app and on the top right of the main view of the mobile app.
Best,
Antti
Share SparkReceipt
Q: what if receipts are in multiple currencies? It is just for me, so I do not need pro?
Antti_SparkReceipt
Dec 4, 2024A: Hi,
You have one preferred currency (home currency) and receipts in other currencies are then converted to that with the transaction date's market rate.
While the free version has access to most features, it is limited to 15 scans per month, making it mainly suitable for very simple businesses, side hustles and e.g. part-time freelancing needs.
Best,
Antti
Share SparkReceipt
Verified purchaser
I own the app sumo version, so it is not free
Q: OCR Bulgarian (Cyrillic) Language?
Antti_SparkReceipt
Dec 4, 2024A: Hi,
This is not yet supported for paper OCR, but digital text in the form of PDFs, CSVs etc can be read. We rely on the Google MLKit Vision for the image OCR and we support new scripts whenever the library gets updated. Currently it supports all latin variant languages, both Chinese variants, Japanese and Indian Devanagari scripts.
Best,
Antti
Share SparkReceipt
Q: Bank Statement Extraction
Can you provide some context in the accuracy of this function.
Can it extract debit and credit transactions independent of the balance on the statement?
Antti_SparkReceipt
Dec 2, 2024A: The exact accuracy is highly dependent on the quality of the input. Banks seem to be notoriously bad at generating PDFs that conform to the official PDF standard but we do our best to normalize them and fix any issues with them before sending it to the AI.
It can extract both credit and debit transactions, and here again the accuracy is the best when the statement contains explicit plus and minus signs in the sums, and I would be more careful if the data is in e.g. "Money in" and "Money out" tabs, as the internal PDF data rarely reflects this layout accurately. The AI is very good at deducing even in this case, but not correct 100% of the time.
Best,
Antti
Share SparkReceipt
Q: Bank statement transactions
Please clarify what you mean by Bank statement transactions and bank statement extraction? Does the SparkReceipt pull the bank transactions from connected bank accounts and credit cards?
Does it do at least basic reports of expenses to be used for taxes? Recognizes GST? etc...
How do you compare to Wave accounting which works really well especially for us Canadians? I really am not keen on seating all day and scan receipts manually and rather have the transactions pulled., automatically categorized and accounted like in Wave.
Thank you in advance!
Antti_SparkReceipt
Edited Nov 29, 2024A: Hi Egor,
The bank statement extraction refers to the ability to scan any PDF or CSV bank statements (so not direct pulls from bank feeds, which is on the roadmap). It uses AI to take any format statements and output the transaction lines.
It recognizes GST, VAT and PST (for Canada), and is able to do Excel, CSV and PDF reports with this information.
Wave Accounting is regional and available to only US and CA businesses, so I am not super familiar with it and what it can actually do. Seems like a well-liked and good software. One main difference is that we are not trying to do accounting (yet), and focus more on collecting and categorizing the materials for accounting - with some basic expense and income tracking tools and reporting built in. Receipt and invoice scanning is super essential for most businesses, since a digital transaction from bank feed alone is not enough proof for audits in most countries.
Best,
Antti
Share SparkReceipt
Ok, thanks.
We don't really do any paper statements anymore in Canada. All is digital in online banking...
And about comparing to Wave (besides not able to pull the transactions)? and tbout the reports for the income tax preparation? Sales taxes calculations?
Hi Egor,
I get it. We don't do paper statements here in Finland either, but this initially a feature requested by our smaller accounting customers that needed help sorting out paper material with AI. We can do digital banking transactions with Plaid with relatively low effort, and will do it - but at an early stage we need to look at underserved segments to gain a foothold and expand from there.
2/2 And the app can do pretty comprehensive reports in Excel with various tax breakdowns (for example GST+PST in Cadana, or breakdown by VAT tiers in EU and elsewhere). Cannot of course guarantee they are exactly in the format what is required for each country's needs. However we are actively listening to feedback on this and are quick to add these required fields as the needs arise.
Best, Antti
Q: Separate businesses?
If I buy for example 5 or 10 codes... can I separate the usage credits between different businesses I own?
Can I use this for invocies in Swedish too? Or only english?
Antti_SparkReceipt
Nov 29, 2024A: Hi Anton,
The credits are shared between all your subaccounts for different businesses, so if you e.g. have a 1000 credits total you can use them in any account linked to you. The AI can read Swedish invoices fine, SEK is a fully supported currency and the dot-based date format in Sweden (dd.mm.yyyy) is also supported both in display and in data extraction.
Best,
Antti
Share SparkReceipt