Every business expense, tracked and ready for your accountant.
No more shoeboxes of receipts. No more forgotten costs eating into your profit.
It’s one of the most common problems for Irish business owners: you pay for something, tuck the receipt into your pocket, and promptly forget about it. Come year end, you’re missing half your expenses, and paying more tax than you should.
Lite Books makes it easy to record every expense the moment it happens. Log the amount, choose a category, add the VAT, and attach a photo of the receipt. The whole thing takes about thirty seconds on your phone.
Better yet, if you snap a picture of a receipt, Lite Books can read it automatically — vendor name, date, amount, and VAT all filled in for you. By the time your accountant needs your figures, everything is already organised, categorised, and ready to hand over.
Key benefits:
- Record expenses quickly on your phone, tablet, or laptop
- Snap a receipt photo or PDF and let Lite Books fill in the details
- Irish VAT rates on purchases (23%, 13.5%, 9%, 4.8%, 0%)
- Keep supplier details, IBAN, and VAT numbers in one place
- Purchase orders with line items when you need a paper trail
- Expenses feed your profit and loss, VAT figures, and Form 11 workings
Record it in seconds, not at year end
Add a bill or expense with the date, description, category, and amount. Mark it unpaid, paid, or part-paid, and note how you paid — card, bank transfer, cash, cheque, or Direct Debit. Add a supplier if you have one, a reference or invoice number, and a note for yourself or your accountant.
If you work in jobs, you can link an expense to a project. If you spend in sterling or another currency, Lite Books stores the euro equivalent for your books.
Snap a receipt — Lite Books fills in the rest
Upload a JPG, PNG, WebP, or PDF (up to 10MB), or take a photo on your phone. Lite Books reads the receipt and fills in the vendor, date, amounts, and VAT. If it recognises a new supplier, you can add them on the spot. If the scan doesn’t catch everything, the receipt is still saved and you finish the details yourself.
That is receipt scanning for expenses — not a robot writing invoices. You stay in control of the numbers; Lite Books just saves you typing.
Irish VAT on purchases, without a spreadsheet
All five Irish VAT rates are built in. Record the amount including or excluding VAT. If you’re not VAT-registered, input VAT is treated as not reclaimable, so you are not pretending you can claim it back.
Lite Books can flag a purchase as domestic, Intra-EU goods or services, or an import from outside the EU, using the supplier’s country and VAT number. Those figures then feed your VAT reports and, if you subscribe, VAT return filing and ROS VAT3 — the same Lite Books subscription that includes expenses.
Suppliers in one place
Keep a proper supplier list: name, email, phone, Irish address and Eircode, VAT number, payment terms, and bank details (IBAN and BIC). Add a supplier from the expense screen when you need to, instead of hunting through old emails for an account number.
Purchase orders when you need a paper trail
For bigger buys, raise a purchase order with line items, Irish VAT, and a PDF you can download. Move it from draft to approved, sent, or received so you know what is still outstanding. Expenses and purchase orders sit together under Purchases — they are not part of free invoicing after the trial.
Ready for your accountant
Categorised expenses drop into your profit and loss. Unpaid bills show as payables on the balance sheet. Input VAT is separated for VAT reports. Come income tax time, expenses map into Form 11-style groupings so you are not reconstructing the year from a shoebox.
Keep the receipt on the expense so you can open or download it later. Your accountant gets organised figures; you keep the backup.
On your phone as well as at the desk
The Lite Books mobile app can list and add expenses, upload a receipt, and run the same scan as the website. Capture the cost while you are still at the counter, instead of promising yourself you will “do the receipts on Sunday”.
Included in your trial — then with a subscription
Try every Lite Books feature free for 30 days — no card required. When the trial ends, invoicing, quotes, customers, and online payments stay free. Expenses, suppliers, purchase orders, and VAT return filing stay available if you subscribe for €9.99 a month (or €99.99 a year), including VAT.
See simple pricing, or create your free account and log your first receipt today.
