Receipts
Receipts are the paperwork nobody misses until the accountant asks for them. There's one decision in them that stays ours: what we pay for, and whether it's still worth paying for. The rest is reading billing emails and copying numbers, which a worker can do every morning without being asked. This page shows how we used to keep track, how it runs now, and the parts it runs on.
How we built ours
A receipt is a fact, not a task. File it as a row the morning it arrives, and the month's spend adds itself up.
How we used to do it
- Every so often we'd search the inbox for each supplier's billing email.
- Open each one and copy out the amount, the period and what it was for.
- Put them in a spreadsheet, supplier by supplier.
- Find out about a declined card when a service stopped, or when we next looked.
- Do it all again at the end of the year for the accountant.
A search every time we needed a number, and failed charges found late.
What changed
We still keep the list of what we pay for, and we still fix a card when it fails. Finding the receipts, reading them and typing them up stopped being ours.
How we do it now
- Every morning the worker reads the new billing emails.
- Each receipt becomes one row: the supplier, the amount and the period.
- A failed charge becomes a "needs you" item in that morning's briefing.
- The month's spend is the sum of the rows.
Nothing to do most mornings, and one line in the briefing when a card fails.
The parts
The same table as everything else, with each receipt written as a record: a fact that is closed the moment it arrives, so it never sits on anyone's to-do list. The worker in the morning run, reading billing emails. A short register of what recurs, kept by hand, that the rows are checked against. And one design choice that keeps it honest: the worker files facts and makes no judgements, so anything that needs one, a failed charge or a vague amount, comes to us as a "needs you" item.
What it took us
The receipt rows arrived with the rebuild of the morning run in September, and the register was built by hand the same week from the receipts already in the inbox. Moving every supplier's billing to the one inbox the worker reads is still under way, one supplier at a time.