For all those folks keeping track of your expenses (a lot of us need to share the details with the CA, etc) — how are you guys doing it if you use some software? I am using Toshl since the last 5-6 years now and it works okay — gives me reporting and excel downloads and stuff which I then later change for my CA’s consumption but it is such a pain to add expenses to it. 95% of my expenses come in my email - credit card transactions. I read that some folks send receipts to another email which their CA has access to. Anything else?

Yours might be a high volume problem I think. :) I add notes on PDF CC statements and send them to the accountant. No others software/service.

I use expensify, it works well., but I am planning to try quickbooks as it has other good features too.

@bitter-salesclerk-57109 Ouch! 😬 It is not that high volume but I will miss out about 5-10% and then my CA will ping to ask what this was on the CC statement and I will be scampering a year later trying to figure out what

PAYTM-CC

actually means 😕 @nice-country-1598 - do you still need to manually fill it in?

I collect only bills through expensify , it works by picture, email attachments, it will just parse them. My CA used to have bills on that date for specific expense they see in bank/CC. Works well for bills but importing bank statements is still manual, quickbooks connects with bank and ask you to review newly imported statements I guess.

Hey Saurabh, Check out two videos of Matt D’Avella on YouTube. May be just may be it could be helpful to you. Wish I could share the link. I have blocked YouTube access for work hours.

@loud-glass-33663 Do you really care about the finer grain details of your expenses that these tools give you? I figured I didn't. The Chart of Accounts maintained by my CA was enough granularity for me. So it was easier to pay their bookkeeper to dig up receipts and match them to my CC statements. I still spend about 2-3 days a year in total helping out with "suspense" where the bookkeeper wasn't able to match a receipt.

@helpful-gigabyte-47939 Not really. They did at one time. But I have noticed that if I am not on top of stuff, lots of stuff slips through cracks and I end up paying substantially higher tax than I should be. At the end of the year, if I give a straightforward excel sheet to my CA, I have a good idea on my tax liabilities. (Maybe it is a specific issue with my CA as he does not have many bookkeepers). But I feel the need to be on top of stuff. An optimum solution would be something automated that reads my emails and figures out what category expenses need to go in (with some sort of initial training). 😊

@loud-glass-33663 You might want to try . I don't use it, but you might find it useful. I depend on my CA/Bookkeeper to categorize things for me and present me with a report.

Thanks @helpful-gigabyte-47939 This is perfect. Going to give it a good shot. Hopefully it works for me.

Monthly diligence. This is a giant pain for me. And I am looking for Mint like solutions that work. Every month, I gather all the statements ( bank, PayTM, Ola money, Credit Card etc), invoices, receipts etc. Then I annotate them and send over.

Walnut and it's PDF/Excel exports & visualizations are beautiful - works well for me - tracks 3-4 accounts all automatically via the app

@loud-glass-33663 I've been using Zoho Expense for over a year now. It's super convenient and makes dealing with expenses a lot easier. I've connected my cards and spend a day in a month to categorise them. Got any petty cash transactions? Fire up their expense app, take a screenshot of receipt and done. It will try to automatically detect the merchant and categorise it automatically. It's not accurate but that doesn't matter much to me. I can always go back and edit it later, as I have the screenshot.

@powerful-potato-94851 Do they automatically pull from banks?

Yep, they do. I think they cover almost all banks, definitely all the well known ones. Tbh, the integration can be broken sometimes depending on bank to bank. I had linked up Yes Bank and was working fine for few months then suddenly stopped. Generally this happens due to the bank's integration

@powerful-potato-94851 Thanks for the feedback. When you say connected Cards, I did see that - but it asks for your account Username & password. I am guessing it scrapes the data from the bank / card website? Do you have an idea on that? I am not currently in a mental state to hand over bank credentials to Zoho as yet 😬

Even then, you can import all transactions in an excel sheet statement. Once imported, you can continue categorising them

Gotcha. Thanks Viraj.

I think the main usp for me is the ability to categorise and annotate each transaction. After a few transaction it automatically starts pre-filling merchant, category, etc fields. For instance, if you mark an Uber ride as Automobile expense couple of times, then subsequently it will try to guess and prefill it. Saves a lot of time!

@loud-glass-33663 you're right. Our banks still don't have APIs! Quickbooks does the same - asks to fork over bank username and password. That was a red line for me to use auto-import. I used manual xls uploads for a while but it was too much work. So I went back to the CA.

Yeah, I know thats what Mint does as well for most banks. My only concern is that because they need to push the creds into the bank website, it has to be sometimes converted to cleartext - before it can plug those in. Which means a human could do that as well if they have access to the DB. It is scary.