I have completely rebuilt the way DoubleAgent handles receipts. It's easier to use and less confusing than before.

Why did I bother spending several weeks on receipts when FreeAgent has Smart Capture? Well, there are several scenarios which FreeAgent just doesn't handle – for example receipts by email, and receipts for transactions that haven't appeared in the bank feed yet – and these scenarios are actually pretty common. DoubleAgent supplies the missing features :)

Before

Previously (and for reasons that made sense at the time!) DoubleAgent had two separate ways of handling receipts: the "receipt photos" feature and the "receipt emails" feature. The former was designed for paper receipts which you accumulate while out and about. The latter was designed for subscription services which send you a monthly receipt by email. And more recently DoubleAgent gained a sort-of hybrid of the two for one-off receipts by email.

It all worked...but it was confusing. I even found it confusing, on the odd occasion when something glitched and I had to dive into the code to investigate.

Now

There's a single, unified way to handle receipts. It doesn't matter whether you photograph a paper receipt or forward in an emailed receipt – DoubleAgent has a single place to deal with them.

For receipts that you get emailed regularly, such as for web hosting, you can set up mail rules to direct them automatically to the right bank explanation in FreeAgent.

You can read the receipt docs here and try it out yourself!

Next time?

DoubleAgent doesn't try to extract the currency and amount from receipts but it would be nice if it did.

The reason it doesn't is because I thought it would be difficult to do 100% reliably, and unless it was 100% reliable it wasn't worth doing. Something that is correct 98% of the time lulls you into a false sense of security so you tend to miss the 2% that's wrong.

However I have never actually tried it. Perhaps I should!