If you run a small business, you know the drill. Someone buys something for work. They shove the receipt in their pocket. A week later, it's a faded, crumpled piece of thermal paper that may or may not say "€47.50" on it. Or maybe they email it to accounts@, where it joins a graveyard of unprocessed PDFs.
This is how most small businesses handle expenses in 2026. And it's absurd.
The spreadsheet trap
Most teams start with a shared Google Sheet or Excel file. It works for the first month. Then columns get misaligned, someone accidentally deletes a formula, and nobody remembers what "misc — €23" was for. The spreadsheet becomes a liability, not a tool.
The alternative? Enterprise expense software like SAP Concur or Expensify. These are built for companies with hundreds of employees and budgets to match. A 15-person consultancy doesn't need workflow automation engines and corporate card reconciliation. They need a way to photograph a receipt and have it show up in a spreadsheet.
What actually works
The best expense process is the one nobody thinks about. You take a photo, the data gets extracted, someone approves it, and at month-end there's a clean file ready for the accountant.
That's exactly what we built with ricevuta.ai. No training sessions, no onboarding calls, no 47-page user manual. Open the app, point your camera, done.
AI changes the game
The part that used to take the longest — manually typing vendor names, amounts, dates, and VAT numbers into a spreadsheet — is now handled by AI in seconds. Modern vision models can read receipts in any language, handle crumpled paper, faded ink, and even handwritten totals.
This isn't futuristic technology. It's available today, and it costs fractions of a cent per receipt. The only question is why more tools haven't adopted it yet.
Built for Europe
One thing we noticed: most expense tools are built for the US market. They don't understand VAT, they don't handle multiple currencies well, and they certainly don't know what a "scontrino" is.
We built ricevuta.ai for UK and Italian businesses from day one. English and Italian interfaces, automatic VAT extraction, EUR and GBP as first-class currencies, and data hosted in the EU.
If you're tired of chasing receipts, give it a try. It's free for teams up to 5.