Tuesday, 07:40. A plumber photographs eleven receipts on his van dashboard and sends them to his bookkeeper on WhatsApp. A cafe owner forwards a month of supplier invoices from her Gmail, each in its own email. A letting agent attaches a zip. Three clients, three formats, same morning.
The bookkeeper's job that morning is to download each file, work out which client it belongs to, read the total, type it into Xero as a bill and attach the image. About four minutes a document when nothing goes wrong. Forty documents is most of a morning, and none of it is billable at the rate she quotes for actual advice.
The fix is one address. Call it docs@ on your own domain. Clients forward to it, photograph to it, or have their suppliers send to it directly. WhatsApp images can be routed in as well.
Each document that arrives is read. Supplier name, invoice number, date, net, VAT, gross. The sender address and the supplier are checked against your client list, so an invoice from a builders' merchant sent by Dave lands under Dave's company, and an invoice from the same merchant sent by Priya lands under hers. Where the match is uncertain, it goes into a holding list with the two most likely clients, and you pick.
The matched document is posted as a draft bill in Xero, QuickBooks or Sage, under the right organisation, with the PDF or photo attached. Nothing is approved. You open each client's drafts once a day or once a week and approve in a batch. The four-minute job per document becomes a five-second glance.
Duplicates get caught because the invoice number and supplier are already in the ledger. A receipt that arrives twice from two phones is flagged and held.
This is the kind of thing we build. It runs in your own accounts, with your own Xero login, and the documents never leave your domain. How many did you retype last week?