Create and update accounting categories

Receipt Bot revolutionizes the categorization of your expenses, eliminating countless hours spent on data entry and manual classification. Many users invest significant time and effort into data entry of bills or receipts and ensuring that each transaction is appropriately categorized.

Classifying expenses correctly is essential for meaningful reporting, and Receipt Bot applies advanced machine-learning techniques to categorize your transactions automatically. However, before the automatic categorization, uploading your chart of accounts to Receipt Bot is essential.

In this article, we will discuss how you can manage your chart of accounts in Receipt Bot for accurate assignment.

The following options are available related to managing the chart of account data in Receipt Bot;

1. Sync chart of accounts from accounting software
2. Manually add a category
3. Import chart of accounts using CSV template
4. Update details for existing accounts

Option 1 – Sync chart of accounts from accounting software

When you integrate a Receipt Bot business with Xero or QuickBooks Online, all your accounting categories (Chart of Accounts) are imported from your accounting software.

Following the relevant user guide, you can find more details on integrating a business with accounting software.

• If you need to connect to Xero, then follow this guide; Connect to Xero
• If you need to connect to QuickBooks Online, then follow this guide; Connect to QuickBooks Online

Note: Receipt Bot links processed documents to accounting categories imported from the accounting software as part of the extraction process. Therefore, it is essential to integrate your business before uploading documents else categorization gets missed on processed documents.

Receipt Bot does not allow updates to the chart of accounts when imported from an integrated accounting software.

Option 2 – Manually add a category

You can use Receipt Bot as a standalone tool for expense management; in this case, you can use the default chart of accounts created for you when you set up your business. To add custom categories to the default chart of accounts, please follow these steps;

Step 1 – Navigate to the “Master Data” page using the business navigation menu.

Step 2 – Click the “Categories” page.

Step 3 – Click the “Add Category” button.

Note: All fields are mandatory to be filled on this form.

Step 4 – Enter the name, type and code for the category.

Step 4 – Click the “Save” button to confirm changes.

Your new category should be added now.

Pro-tip: You should apply this category to relevant documents so that Receipt Bot can analyze those documents and assign them to future documents based on the identified pattern.

Option 3 – Import chart of accounts using a CSV template

If you already have a complete chart of accounts and want to use it instead of the default COA. You can import it by following these steps using a CSV template;

Step 1 – Navigate to the “Master Data” page using the business navigation menu.

Step 2– – Click the ‘Categories’ page.

Step 3 – Click the ‘Import Category’ button.

Step 4 – Download the Category Import template.

Step 5 – Enter the details in the fields to the downloaded CSV template. 

The following data must be provided in the template;

• Code
• Category Name
• Account Type

Following is a list of the allowed values for the “Account types” column:

• Assets
• Liabilities
• Equity
• Income and Revenue
• Expenses and Costs

Note: You need to ensure that the account type value matches any of the above values, or the system may return an error.

Step 6 – Click the “Browse” button and select the CSV file.

The system will validate your list for the following checks;

• All fields are populated in each row.
• There are no duplicate values based on the Code or Category name.

Step 7 – Check the “Archive Existing Categories” option if importing a new set of categories and want to archive the default ones.

Step 8 – Click the ‘Import’ button to start the import process

Step 9 – Click the “Finish” button.

Your chart of accounts should now be imported and available for use in the Receipt Bot app.

Pro-tip: If you are using external accounting software, you should import the COA code provided by the software. When you download processed invoice data from Receipt Bot, the COA code is available so that your accounting software can identify the category correctly.

Option 4 – Update details for existing accounts

Step 1 – Navigate to the “Master Data” page using the business navigation menu.

Step 2 – Click the ‘Categories’ page.

Step 3 – Navigate to the “Edit” icon for the relevant category.

Step 4 –Update the category name or account type, or code.
You can also update the status to Archive”, which will disable using that category on any future documents.

Step 5 – Click the “Save” icon to apply the changes.

Your category should be updated now.

Limitations in mobile Receipt Bot apps

Receipt Bot has no feature-related add or update of categories from the Receipt Bot mobile apps. If you need to perform such changes, you need to use the web.

Next Step: Managing payment methods in Receipt Bot

As you have set up your categories in Receipt Bot, the next step should be to get your payment methods finalized in Receipt Bot so that the appropriate payment method gets linked to the processed document. Create and update payment methods