Categories, split receipts and business use percentage in ReceiptBook

Your accountant thinks in categories; your receipts don't. A hardware store receipt can hold tools and office supplies, and your phone bill pays for private calls too. ReceiptBook gives you three tools for that in the review screen: the category, the split and the business share.

Standard categories

For every country except Vietnam, ReceiptBook uses the same 16 expense categories, plus Income for money in:

Vietnam has its own list for household businesses, such as Goods & raw materials, Labor, Electricity and Rent of premises.

Each standard category has a fixed code in the exports, which is what lets an accountant map your file to their chart of accounts once and reuse that mapping every period. You pick the category in review, or a vendor or category rule picks it for you. A document without one shows No category in the Inbox.

Your categories

Sixteen categories are deliberately broad. If you want to see Tools apart from the rest of Goods & materials, or Trade fairs apart from Advertising, create your own.

Go to Settings > Your categories, or tap New category… right in the category picker. Give it a name (the app suggests something like Tools or Fairs) and choose which standard category it Counts under.

Your category then appears at the top of the picker. Totals and the accountant's exports keep the standard category's code, so their mapping keeps working, and transactions.csv adds your name in an own_category column. If you remove one later, its documents are filed under the standard category again.

Split one receipt across categories

Splits are for expenses. The Book's Where it went card counts each part under its own category, and in transactions.csv a split document gets a row per category, so the accountant sees exactly how the receipt was divided. The original receipt is still one document with one image.

Business use percentage

Some costs are partly private: a phone contract, a car, a home internet line. Open the document, tap Business use and enter the share that is business, or tap one of the shortcuts 100 %, 75 %, 50 % or 25 %. The editor shows the result right away, for example Business part: $30.00 of $60.00.

From then on:

• the Book's Totals count the business share, with the note that totals count the business share of documents used partly for business
• the VAT by rate card counts the business share only
• transactions.csv adds the business-use share and the business amounts, and bookkeeping-software files use the business part
• the document itself still shows the full amount you paid

Which percentage is right for you is a question for your accountant or tax office; ReceiptBook only applies the number you enter. Separating personal and business expenses has more on that.

No VAT on this document

Not every receipt carries VAT: a train ticket from a small operator, a foreign purchase, a supplier below the VAT threshold. In the VAT field you can pick one of your country's rates, which also shows the resulting VAT and net, or choose No VAT on this document. If several rates were read from the receipt, the editor points out that picking one replaces them. For receipts with several rates, see foreign currency and VAT rates.

FAQ

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