Photo of the receipt to coded cost in your books. Ten seconds.
Snap the gas-station, supply-house, or lunch receipt, say which job it belongs to, and put the phone away. Punch reads it, assigns the vendor, codes every line, runs your approval, and lands it in your accounting system — cost report and budget already updated.
A receipt touches five hands before it touches the books
Today the receipt gets photographed, emailed to the office, saved to a desktop folder, typed into a spreadsheet, coded from memory, chased for approval, and re-keyed into the accounting system — each handoff a chance for it to stall or vanish. The people doing that work aren’t adding judgment; they’re moving the same numbers between parties.
And that’s the receipt that makes it. The one still riding around on a dashboard surfaces at month-end, coded as a guess, on a job that closed its cost report weeks ago.
One photo, one sentence, ten seconds
The entire handoff chain — emails, folders, re-keying — collapses into a photo and a sentence. Here’s what happens in the ten seconds after you snap it.
- 01
Snap it and say the job
Photograph the receipt in the Punch app and say which project it belongs to — “this is the Maple Street job.” That’s your whole part. (Forwarding it by email works too.)
- 02
Punch reads every line
Punch reads the receipt, assigns the vendor, and extracts every line item — then applies a cost code to each line from your cost structure. Not one lump sum: the hammer, the tape measure, and the trash bags each land on the right code.
- 03
Your approval rules run
The expense routes through the approval flow you configured — different rules by expense type and by user — so the right person taps approve and nobody chases signatures.
- 04
It lands in your books
The approved expense is pushed into your accounting system, and the job’s cost report and budget update automatically. No export, no re-keying, no month-end reconstruction.
From paper to structured cost, line by line
Punch doesn’t file the receipt as a $121.83 blob. It reads the paper the way your bookkeeper would on a good day: vendor identified, every line item pulled off, and a cost code applied to each one — tools to the tools code, supplies to the supplies code — with the original photo attached for the audit trail.
Then your approval flow runs. The rules are yours to configure by expense type and by user: a field crew’s tool run can route straight to the PM while a big equipment rental takes a different path. Once approved, the expense is pushed into your accounting system and the job’s cost report and budget tick up on their own.
Where this sits in the flow
Expenses are the uncommitted spend of bid-to-books: the costs that never had a PO but still belong in the job’s books — and with capture this fast, they actually get there.
How work moves through this step
In to Punch
- Receipt photos from the field
- Receipts forwarded by email
Out from Punch
- Approved, line-coded expense in accounting
- Cost report and budget updated
Connection: Capture by photo in the Punch app or by email forward; approved results sync to your accounting system
See Punch work on your own workflow.
It's a working session, not a slide deck. Bring a real PO, an invoice, or a daily report. You'll use Punch on it live.