The shoebox client, made profitable.
Your clients snap receipts as they happen. Bosca reads them, VAT-classifies them at the point of capture, and queues anything questionable for review. Your team stops keying paper and starts doing the work they trained for. Here's what that does to the numbers.
Two junior days of keying becomes an hour of judgment
A shoebox client costs a junior roughly two days of keying and coding at year-end. With Bosca, the receipts were captured, read, coded and VAT-classified during the year — what's left is about an hour reviewing the items the AI flagged. That's several hundred euro of recovered margin per client, per year, against a cost of around €96.
Across a book of thirty shoebox clients, that's weeks of capacity back — during Form 11 season, which is exactly when you'd feel it.
The review queue reframes what remains: judgment calls on flagged items — EU VAT traps, resale classification, disallowed categories — instead of transcription.
Per shoebox client, per year
| Year-end keying & coding, today | ~2 junior days |
| The same client on Bosca | ~1 hour of review |
| Bosca Business plan | ~€96 / year |
| Recovered margin | several hundred € / client |
× 30 shoebox clients ≈ weeks of staff capacity returned in filing season.
The hard half of every VAT3 — already done, six times a year
For any client without clean books, each VAT3 means assembling purchase records six times a year — and the hard part of a VAT3 is almost entirely on the purchases side. That's the side Bosca takes care of.
T1 output VAT comes from the client's own sales invoicing — usually a handful of lines at known rates. The traps live in the boxes Bosca captures and classifies at source: intra-EU acquisitions, postponed accounting, reverse charge, wrongly-charged foreign VAT, disallowed categories.
Instead of a bi-monthly scramble, receipts have been flowing in and getting reviewed continuously. On the 23rd, you open the VAT3 pack and transcribe the boxes. An hour to three per client per period becomes minutes — six times a year, across the book.
Where VAT3s go wrong — captured by Bosca
- Intra-EU acquisitions (E2 / ES2)
- Postponed accounting on imports (PA1)
- Reverse-charge purchases
- Foreign VAT wrongly charged — and not reclaimable through the VAT3
- Disallowed categories: entertainment, food & drink, petrol
Each flag lands on the receipt the day it's scanned — not in a deadline-week archaeology dig.
The RTD stops being a reconstruction and becomes a report
The RTD is hated for a reason: it demands net-by-rate detail that nobody tracked during the year, so it gets reverse-engineered at year-end. And it matters more than its reputation suggests — an outstanding RTD blocks tax clearance certificates and can hold up VAT refunds. For a contractor client who needs clearance for public work, that's an emergency the accountant absorbs.
Bosca classifies every purchase by VAT rate at the moment of capture. The purchases columns of the RTD become a read-off from data that was rate-classified all year — in the same VAT Returns screen as the VAT3 pack.
The pitch isn't "faster." It's that the RTD stops being a reconstruction and becomes a report.
Why the RTD bites
- Net-by-rate purchase detail, demanded once a year, tracked by no one
- Outstanding RTD → tax clearance cert blocked
- Outstanding RTD → VAT refunds can be withheld
- With Bosca: every receipt already carries its rate — the grid fills itself
They reclaim more — and get bothered less
Small businesses systematically under-reclaim input VAT because receipts get lost. Every faded thermal slip and every receipt that never made it out of the van is reclaimable VAT gone — and in an audit, an undocumented input credit gets disallowed.
Capture-at-source closes the leak. The VAT is claimed because the receipt exists, and the source document sits behind every claim — attached, legible, and backed up from the day it happened.
The client-side story is simple: "you'll reclaim more and get bothered less." That's what makes it comfortable to push the app onto clients.
What your clients notice
- VAT recovered that used to leak away with lost receipts
- No year-end shoebox panic
- Fewer "what was this €400 in March?" emails
- A live view of where the money goes, all year
- The source document behind every claim, if Revenue ever asks
Not a receipt tool — the prime books of entry for purchases
The portal's trial balance screen does something subtler than save time. Every receipt is coded to its nominal account, grouped with subtotals, and summarised as double entry that balances by construction — with the full transactional detail exportable as a nominal journal, ready to post. That upgrades Bosca's status from "receipt tool" to prime books of entry for purchases.
The drill-down is the killer feature in one specific scenario: a Revenue aspect query says "support the input credit in your July/August VAT3." You go from trial balance figure to nominal to coded line to receipt image in three clicks — instead of digging through folders. That's audit defence at conversation speed.
And because you verify the coding before anything hits the ledger — spotting the fuel receipt that landed in the wrong nominal — you can trust the Sage publish.
Aspect query → answered
- Trial balance figure — Motor Expenses, the period in question
- Expand the nominal — every coded purchase line behind the total
- Open the receipt — the original image, VAT breakdown and all
Export the trial balance summary, or the transactional nominal journal (CSV) — date-filtered, ready to post.
The machinery behind the numbers
Everything above rests on a portal built for review at speed.
Duplicate detection
Same amount, date and merchant? Flagged before it hits the books — the client who scans a receipt twice, caught automatically. Dismiss or reject in one click.
VAT issues flagged at capture
EU acquisitions, reverse charge, wrongly-charged foreign VAT, resale classification and disallowed categories are identified the day the receipt is scanned — with the AI's reasoning shown inline.
The AI shows its doubts
Uncertain fields are flagged for a second look, and clicking any field highlights the matching text on the document itself. Verifying takes a glance, not a hunt.
Review at keyboard speed
Approve, reject, next — with keyboard shortcuts, per-field confidence badges and supplier-history hints. A stack of twenty receipts is a two-minute job.
Publish to Sage
Reviewed purchases post to Sage Business Cloud Accounting as purchase invoices on the creditors ledger — with paid receipts settled against your chosen bank account. More accounting package integrations are on the way.
Exports for every ledger
CSV in Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, FreshBooks or generic formats, plus trial balance and nominal journal exports — filtered by date, split by paid and unpaid.
Batch upload from the desk
Clients still email the odd receipt? Drop a batch of photos or multi-page PDFs into the portal and they scan in the background.
Little and often, not all at once
Receipts arrive the day they happen, so review happens year-round in spare minutes — not in a deadline-week dump.
Status flows back to the client
Reject an illegible receipt with a note and the client's phone updates — they re-scan it that afternoon, not next January.
Run the numbers on one client
Pick your worst shoebox. We'll set you up with the portal and an invite code for the client, and you can watch the year-end keying disappear. Alpha places are limited.
support@boscaexpenses.com