How to

How to submit a receipt from your phone

Someone buys pipe at the hardware store on the way to a leak, and the receipt goes in a pocket. By month-end it is in the truck, in a text thread or gone, and the bookkeeper is asking what a $42.17 charge was for. This guide is for sending it in from the parking lot, with the job it belonged to attached, in under a minute.

Before you start

  • Sign in to BasicBMS in your phone's browser. You stay signed in when the browser is closed in the background, so you are not typing a password at the hardware store.
  • Who can do this: every staff login. When this shipped, everyone with employee access was given it. Customers using the member portal do not see it.
  • Setting up a new employee? Give their login the receiptuser role along with the rest, or Submit Receipt won't be in their menu.

Steps

  1. Tap your name in the top-right corner (on a phone, just the photo and arrow show). Choose Submit Receipt.

  2. Tap Take photo. Your phone's camera app opens on the rear camera. Take the picture and confirm it, and you are back on Submit Receipt with the photo added. A long receipt can be several pages: tap Take photo again for each one, up to 10. For a photo you already took, a screenshot, a PDF or a saved email (.eml), tap Choose files instead.

  3. Under What was it for? type a few words: “pipe for the Elm Street leak”. It is optional, but it is the line that saves the bookkeeper a phone call.

  4. Under Tags, start typing a customer's name, a work order number, a service point's address, a vendor. Results are grouped by kind; pick from the list, and tag as many as apply. Tags are optional.

  5. Tap Submit. With more than one page it reads Submit 3 pages, and so on. The receipt appears under My receipts as Submitted.

Photos are shrunk on the phone before they go up, so a receipt sends on one bar of signal.

On an Android phone: share from the camera instead

On some Android phones the browser gets closed while the camera app is open, and the photo never makes it back. If that happens to you, install BasicBMS as an app and send photos the other way round:

  1. On Submit Receipt, tap Install app (under “Photos getting lost?”), or choose Install App from your name menu. If neither shows, open Chrome's ⋮ menu and choose Install app or Add to Home screen.

  2. From then on, take the photo in your camera app (or open it in your gallery), tap Share, and choose BasicBMS. Submit Receipt opens with the photo already attached. Add the note and tags, then tap Submit.

On an iPhone, use Take photo. The install offer and sharing to BasicBMS are Android only.

On a computer

Drag files onto the page, or press Ctrl+V to paste a screenshot. That is the quick way to send an online order confirmation.

Following it up

My receipts shows each receipt's status as accounting works it: Submitted, then Reviewed, then Filed (it is on a bill). If it shows Rejected, the reason accounting gave is shown under it. You can delete a receipt yourself while it is still Submitted.

What posts behind it

Nothing. Submitting a receipt is not an accounting entry. It becomes one only when the bookkeeper files it against a bill.

When it won’t let you

'setup.exe' can't be attached. Receipts can be photos, screenshots, PDFs or saved emails (.eml). You picked a file that is not a receipt. The file name in the message is whatever you attached.

'supplier-invoice.pdf' is 11 MB. The limit is 10 MB per file. Rare, and almost always a PDF: photos are shrunk before upload. Save the PDF smaller, or photograph the pages instead.

A receipt can have up to 10 pages. You went past 10. The first ones up to the limit are kept; submit the rest as a second receipt.

Accounting has already reviewed this receipt, so it can't be deleted from here. Accounting got to it while your list was open. Ask them to delete or reject it.

What this doesn’t do

You don't type the money. The vendor, amount and account are filled in by the bookkeeper, who checks them against your photo, so the photo is what counts: a blurry photo is a blurry receipt.

There is no address to email receipts to and no number to text them to. Sharing a photo to the installed app on Android only opens Submit Receipt with it attached; you still tag it and tap Submit. A receipt that arrived by email can be saved as an .eml file and attached.

It is not a reimbursement. If you paid with your own money, say so in What was it for?; accounting marks it, and paying you back is still their call. There are no expense reports, mileage or per-diem: one receipt at a time. Projects can't be tagged yet.

Related

Stuck on this one? Call (509) 955-0770 and we'll walk through it with you.

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