Caitlyn runs her own business and has four staff working for her. They’re all out on the road talking to clients, potential customers and partners and because the company is new, Caitlyn encourages them to buy coffees and lunches whenever they can, to help cement those relationships.

Her accountant told her to get the receipts from all those coffees and lunches, and any other expenses like mobile data, phone calls, petrol, flights and accommodation, and track them all on a spreadsheet. That way the company can reimburse the staff and where necessary claim back the GST on stuff bought for work.

The accountant even gave Caitlyn a template to work with. Staff list the time, date, amount spent and code it according to what kind of spending it is – entertainment, office expenses, travel and so on. Caitlyn then works out which account she has to apply these costs to and make sure her clients are paying for the incidentals appropriately.

Each staff member then has to tally up their expenses, attach the receipts and get it approved at the end of each month. It’s pretty standard procedure for most businesses that incur expenses and Caitlyn doesn’t have a problem with it, except that each month she has to listen as her staff complain about lost receipts, bicker about scanning in the form and the paper receipts, about receipts for things they can’t remember buying and about how tedious the job is.

So Caitlyn found a better way of doing it. Because she uses Xero for her book keeping, Caitlyn got all her staff signed up for Paypr, from Paymark. Paypr takes the paper out of receipts by having the Paymark EFTPOS terminal send a digital version of the receipt directly to the customer’s Paypr app, in real time as it’s incurred. So for the staff member they don’t have to keep the slips of paper, they simply open the app and code the expense as they spend, rather than waiting until the end of the month.

Because the receipts are sent out in real time, they can process that coffee expense as they wait for the coffee to be made and the digital receipt is sent straight into Xero on the spot. And, because it’s all digital, there’s no remembering to keep paper receipts for anything except the expensive expenses – those over $50 – so at the end of the month there’s nothing to reconcile. No double handling, no photocopying sheets, no writing up expense records – it’s all done already. And for those expenses over $50 when you do need to keep the receipt, or if you find yourself at a non-Paymark shop, then just take a photo of it and save it that way. Simple really.

For Caitlyn, this is great. Her staff are happy, something she cares about, her expenses are processed in real time and the hours they all used to spend managing their receipts is now time they can spend on other things, things that actually add value to the business.

Don’t put up with the end of month expense management madness. Paypr takes the pain out of running your business.

– Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse-

One of the biggest hassles for business owners at the end of the month is working out your expense claims and what to put against the business and what not to claim.

It can be something of a nightmare and for most, the easiest way round it all is to have a separate card for business expenses.

That’s good but you’ve still got to work through that pile of receipts and line them all up with your diary to figure out just who you bought that coffee for or why you parked in the city on that particular day.

Paypr, from Paymark, can help with that. By digitising the whole chain from EFTPOS terminal to Xero account, users can process their expenses in real time as they are incurred so at the end of the month there’s nothing left to do but celebrate.

One question we hear a lot is about GST receipts. The EFTPOS terminal doesn’t print out a GST receipt, which is why many retailers print an extra receipt (and typically staple the two together right through the information you need for your form) meaning you’ve got twice the receipts to work through.

The good news for those claiming GST is that you don’t need a GST invoice for any amount under $50 (an EFTPOS receipt is sufficient) we even had the IRD give us a product ruling to ensure this was, in fact the case. The better news is that when we were developing Paypr we had a look at the number of transactions under $50 right across our customer base and almost 80% of all transactions are under that threshold.

That means that unless you’re buying something substantial, the odds are most of the time you don’t need to get that extra receipt – the Paypr digital trail is enough to prove your claim.

Let’s face it – in this day and age why on earth are we talking about printing off bits of paper to store your business transactions on? Everything else is digitised and we see no reason not to do the same with receipts, whether they’re direct from the terminal as with Paypr, or stored as a photo of the paper receipt. They prove you’ve made that purchase regardless of the medium they’re stored in.

By moving the receipt process to the digital world, as Paypr does, you avoid all of that mucking about at the end of the month and you can manage your business expenses quicker than the barista makes your coffee.

That’s got to be a good thing.

Originally Published on LinkedIn Pulse

Hands up if you’ve ever sat there at the end of the month with an envelope full of receipts, your diary and blinding headache as you try to reconcile your expenses.

It’s a nightmare and it’s one that’s familiar to most contractors, consultants, sales reps, basically anyone who has to incur expenses for work.

Drinks, taxis, coffees, stationery, data for your phone – it all adds up and someone, somewhere wants you to account for it.

In the past that’s meant keeping the receipts and scribbling a note to yourself on the back. Then you have the fun of trying to remember just who you bought that coffee for on the 3rd of the month when your diary is a blank.

There has to be a better way, right? Something that takes the receipt at the very moment you swipe your card through the EFTPOS terminal and shoves it straight into Xero. The good news is, it’s already here.

It’s called Paypr and it’s brought to you by the people behind Paymark, New Zealand’s leading digital payments company.

It works like this. You sign up and link Paypr up to your Xero account. From there, download the app (from either iTunes or Google Play) and add your card – it could be a credit card, debit card, good old EFTPOS card or all three. It’s entirely up to you.

Then when you shop at a Paymark store your transaction will appear on your phone in real time. There will be a copy of your receipt and a way to encode the transaction. Buying a gift for a client, or lunch, or paying for parking – it’s all over to you to code the way your business likes it. Once Paypr has seen you code a transaction once, it learns so next time you spend at that store those fields are already filled in for you. Nice.

Paypr is built for expense claims for both your money and your business’s, so you can claim expenses no matter how you incur them, whether it’s on your own card or work’s.

Each transaction is pushed to your Xero account and so at the end of the month instead of sitting down to countless hours of reconciliation. All you have to do is check and approve, taking mere seconds Time is crucial in business and if you can avoid spending hours each month labouring over your expense admin then that’s time you can spend doing something more productive, or time you can spend on yourself.

Paypr, by Paymark. Because who’s got time to waste on receipts?

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse

With Christmas rush madness almost upon us, now is not the time to be lax about routine-but-important tasks. Here it is – why you should keep on top of expenses as you go.

1. No more paper receipts in your wallet
   There is literally no reason you should hold onto paper receipts for expenses. The IRD has accepted digital copies of receipts for quite some time. That should be reason enough, but here’s 4 more anyway.
2. Be an early adopter
   Paper receipts belong back when you had to book a taxi over the phone or write a cheque for…whatever people used cheques for. Be seen as a trailblazer at meetings and get your receipt sent directly to your phone.
3. The end of month end
   The only thing worse than sorting out your receipts at month-end is the thought of doing it. Code on the go for a clear wallet and a clear mind.
4. Make the most of your expenses
   Because you’re coding expenses on the go, descriptions are going to be accurate. Use that data to track the return on your investment. Ask yourself, is Bill really worth all those coffees?
5. Get the best from your accountant/bookkeeper
   The person who runs your accounts has an intimate knowledge about the state your business that you may not. Spend the time you have with them getting helpful advice, instead of reminiscing the first week of June when you went crazy on the company card.

Save time and keep on top of your expenses with Paypr – The fastest way to get your receipts into Xero.

Originally Published on LinkedIn

When you buy something for work (lunch, beers, parking, whatever) keeping the receipt is essential if you want to get reimbursed, but even if you do everything right, at the end of the month you get to sit down with an envelope full of receipts, your diary and the company spreadsheet and try to figure out just WTF you spent $73.90 on at some place in central Auckland three weeks ago.

It’s a nightmare.

Now you can relax because Paypr puts the receipt straight into your phone in real time, so you can code it and send it on its merry way to Xero while you wait for your latte, or wheat beer, or whatever it is you’re buying.

It saves time and hassles with the accountant, it’s ideal for small businesses that just want to get on with the job they love rather than the paperwork and it means no more Envelopes of Doom at the end of each month.

The typical customer will be a bloke with his own business, maybe a few staff but maybe just himself, run entirely off a Macbook Air and a smartphone. He’s keen to automate all the bullshit in his daily existence and focus on the job he’s getting paid for, and if he can find an app to make life easier (Uber, Slack, Trello for example) he tells all his mates and his accountant and encourages them to use it as well.

He’s social media savvy and often gets called upon by his mates to sort them out with the latest apps, tools and ideas for business.

Originally published on M2 Online.

The Product Manager role in a tech company has been compared to that of a CEO, a janitor and the leader of a jazz band.

As the leader of the loosely-coupled cross-functional teams that have created Paypr, a product that will clean up our wallets by removing the need for paper receipts, I feel a connection with all of these descriptions.

But now, days out from launching Paypr, I will contribute my own perspective.  Product Management is both the most and least important part of bringing a new product to life.

Building any new solution takes a lot of effort from a lot of people. In the case of Paypr, there have been over 30 people involved for the best part of a year. Not only is the team big, but it’s full of highly-skilled and intelligent people, so if the end result of that precious time and effort is something that doesn’t matter to the world, it’s been a terrible waste. Imagine the opportunity cost.

Based on that it seems clear that the foundation for success of a project is choosing the right project in the first place. This is the role of the Product Manager more than anyone else – and by that definition, it’s very important.

But having chosen the right project, and having built the best team for the job, that means the Project Manager is faced with a difficult truth: everyone else, not the Product Manager, is making the product.

It is the output of the developers, the technology team, the marketing creatives and the legal team that actually produces the end result. Yes the Product Manager has to roll up their sleeves from time to time to keep things moving or to plug a gap (not in the code, I can assure you), but primarily the Product Manager is working to ensure that the other people’s work is the right work.

How do you do that? It starts with a vision. For Paypr, it was a society free from the hassle of paper receipts. That’s pretty compelling, relatable and easy to bring to life for people.

Then you build a roadmap – what path will take us from our current state to our ultimate state? The first step is the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) – the first version we’ll launch publicly and build on over time. Interviews, prototyping, observation and iteration led us to define our MVP around three pillars:

• real-time digital receipts
• the fastest expensing solution
• guaranteed accuracy of data.

Of course the MVP doesn’t achieve the vision, but it’s a step towards it, and it’s a step that will offer unique value in the market.

The Product Manager tries to keep things simple, to remind people of the long-term vision and short-term goals, to ensure the market voice is never forgotten, to clear impediments and to get out of the way so the real work can be done.

You can spot the absence of Product Management every time you use a product that doesn’t actually solve a relevant problem. You can spot the absence of a great team of people when technology solutions have the right idea, but are delivered too late or at too high a cost, and miss the market opportunity.

With Paypr we believe we are delivering a product that will take New Zealand on the journey of eliminating the clutter of paper receipts, and give us all time back to do the things we love. A very real problem, a very relevant solution.

Matthew Court – Paypr Product Manager

A quarter of business owners tell Xero they’d like to spend more time outside work. One third says they’d like to save time, and those businesses tend to be the smaller ones where someone’s doing all the work themselves.

The Xero Signals programme brings data together from 10,000 Kiwi small businesses and provides insights into what really keeps them awake at night.

Xero Signals identifies macro-economic trends and uses them to offer insights into how small business owners can streamline their business.

At Paymark we could see businesses wasting time fiddling with paper receipts and saw an opportunity to help. It’s why we built Paypr, to free business owners from spending their days trying to account for their expenses and to let them get on with the real job at hand – running their companies and spending time with their families.

Typically, the end of month ritual is to empty out the envelope of receipts, rummage through the wallet for any strays and gather up parking receipts from the car. Then begins the tedious and brain numbing job of trying to marry up the right receipt with the right client or event.

Did I pay for coffee with this client or that one? Why have I got a parking receipt for Monday when my diary says I didn’t go anywhere? Why haven’t I got a receipt for that lunch?

After an hour or so of hassle the job is done, for another month, generally with a vow to be better at keeping receipts and at scribbling notes on the back of them.

Think about how long it takes to process each receipt you’ve got. It’s anywhere from one minute to five minutes per receipt. Multiply that by the number of receipts each month and again by the number of staff who are writing out expense reports and you’ve got some idea of the size of the problem. Then add on the time it takes for your book keeper to check each one, and then how long it takes the accountant to go through them at their end.

With Paypr, you get all that time back to do more with your business, to do more with your family.

The concept of Paypr was launched at Xerocon last year “We [New Zealand] have a leading EFTPOS network and by working with Paymark we can dramatically reduce paper receipts and save small businesses money and time by accurately and automatically capturing expenses
directly into the Xero platform.” Rod Drury announced in April 2015.

At the time called ‘eReceipts’, Paypr has since had quite a lot of interest in the press, featuring in Computerworld and mentioned in an article in Forbes by Ben Kepes “[The] uptake of electronic payment has helped cast a spotlight on a glaring disconnect – we expect to pay electronically the majority of the time, and yet we accept paper receipts as the status quo. It seems strange that the processing part of the transaction can be digitized but the arguably simpler receipting part can not.”

The most recent article published in the NBR announcing ‘The end of paper and the dawn of Paypr’