DoubleAgent can help you get your receipts and bills into FreeAgent quickly and efficiently.
You can also email your receipts and bills to DoubleAgent. You can set up rules to upload these automatically to FreeAgent, or let them pile up until you're ready to blitz through them all at once.
How to get receipts and bills into DoubleAgent?
There are two ways:
- either drag and drop them onto the Receipts page;
- or email them to DoubleAgent – everyone gets a unique forwarding address to use.
How are your receipts and bills uploaded into FreeAgent?
There are five ways:
- as a new bill;
- as a new expense;
- as an attachment to an explained transaction – DoubleAgent shows you any matches and you just choose the one you want;
- as an explanation of an unexplained transaction – DoubleAgent shows you any matches and you just choose the one you want;
- as an explanation of a pending transaction, i.e. one that hasn't appeared in your bank feed yet.
The only scenario not covered (yet) is re-explaining an explained transaction. This would be useful when FreeAgent's Guess feature has added a totally unhelpful explanation to a transaction which needs the attachment.
What are mail rules?
Mail rules let you completely automate attaching receipts that you get emailed on a regular basis, e.g. monthly web hosting, to the corresponding payment in FreeAgent.
You set up a mail rule for each receipt that you get emailed regularly.
Take the monthly web hosting example. The mail rule tells DoubleAgent how to find your hosting payments and attaches the emailed PDF to the right one.
Typically there are 2 or 3 one-off steps:
- you set up a forwarding rule in your email system to forward your regular receipt emails to DoubleAgent;
- you set up a mail rule in DoubleAgent to tell it (a) how to distinguish these receipts from the others you forward to it, and (b) how to find the corresponding explanations in FreeAgent;
- optionally you set up a bank rule in DoubleAgent to automatically explain your payments to the web hosting provider. You don't need to do this if you rely on FreeAgent's Guess feature.
After that, you can forget about those receipts :) The hosting provider emails them to you; your email system automatically forwards them to DoubleAgent; DoubleAgent automatically attaches them to the right payment in FreeAgent. It all runs automatically without any intervention from you.
Note that mail rules can only attach receipts to bank explanations. They can't create an expense or a bill.
