Custom app for receipts and invoice approval on the go
As long as your VAT return is filed quarterly, a receipt can sit in a dashboard drawer for a month. Reporting per transaction makes that too late: the counterparty has already reported the transaction, and your side is still missing. Recording therefore shifts from month-end close to the moment of the transaction itself, and that moment is almost never in the office.
Why the purchasing side feels the pain first
The ViDA package, adopted by the Council in March 2025, introduces e-invoicing under EN 16931 and digital reporting per transaction. In the Dutch timetable, domestic e-invoicing starts on 1 January 2030 and domestic digital reporting on 1 January 2032. For intra-community transactions, the date is 1 July 2030.
Attention almost always goes to the outgoing invoice, because that one is yours. The purchasing side is harder, because someone else determines when something arrives and in what form. Once both parties report per transaction, a comparison arises: your report alongside your supplier's. Differences that are now smoothed out within a quarter will become visible.
That is where the practical problem lies. Part of your purchasing flow does not originate in a system but in someone's hand: a receipt from the wholesaler, a delivery note on the building site, a fuel card, a parking ticket. Those documents travel in a van and surface weeks later. That worked as long as the month-end close set the rhythm.
How we build this
Here, the document is the unit and the moment of recording is the gain. If a receipt comes in on the day itself, the rest is administration.
We look at who receives which receipt and what happens to it now. At most companies that is three or four places, and each place has a different habit.
Take a photo, link it to an order or project, done. Every extra step costs usage, and an app nobody uses doesn't move the problem, it doubles it.
Amount, supplier and date are suggested and confirmed by a person. Processing automatically without confirmation produces errors that are only reported later.
The app is an input channel, not a second set of books. What is recorded passes on to the system from which the return and reporting are produced.
What the app does in practice
The app does little, and that little must fit in a single action. Which components you need depends on how your purchasing flow originates.
Recording the receipt at the moment itself
Photo with time and location, linked directly to an order, project or cost centre. A receipt that arrives the same day is an administrative task; a receipt four weeks old is a hunt.
Recognition with confirmation
Amount, date, supplier and VAT are suggested and confirmed by the user. Suggestions work; automatically posting without checks produces exactly the errors that will later be reported.
Approving on the go
A manager sees what needs assessing and approves or rejects it with a reason. As long as approval hangs on a desk, one person's diary determines your turnaround time.
Fully offline operation
Recording carries on without a connection and syncs later, with each document showing whether it succeeded. In a car park or on a building site, that is the normal situation.
Missing documents made visible
An order without a receipt, a receipt without an order, an amount that deviates from the purchase order. The system shows the gap while there is still something to be done about it.
Passing it on to your administration
What is recorded goes via integrations to your ERP or accounting. The reporting side itself is covered in ViDA software.
Who we build for
Where documents originate differs greatly between companies. Four situations.
Construction and installation
Materials are delivered to the construction site and the receipt goes to the site manager. Linking it to the correct project matters more than the receipt itself, because without a project, post-project costing is only an estimate.
Service companies with van stock
Tradespeople buy supplies on the road from wholesalers. The receipt travels in the van and only surfaces at the next cleaning run, usually after month-end close. See also the field service app, where this fits.
Transport and distribution
Fuel, toll and ferry receipts are generated on the road and across borders. For cross-border trips, the counterparty in another Member State also has to report.
Offices with many small expenses
Travel costs, subscriptions and ad hoc purchases are each small but add up to a lot. What goes wrong here isn't the amount but the missing proof of purchase.
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The app is an input channel for your accounts, not a standalone system. Whatever it records flows into the source from which your tax return and reporting are built.
Why Appfront
Month-end close loses its purpose
With reporting per transaction, collecting after the fact is too late. We move the recording to the moment the document is created.
Documents are created where there is no signal
Car parks, building sites, warehouses. Offline is therefore the starting point, not the emergency fallback.
Recognition suggests, it doesn't decide
We have a person confirm. An error that has been posted automatically and only reported afterwards is more costly than the second it takes to confirm.
No second set of books
The app passes data on to your existing package through integrations. Two places holding the same receipt are guaranteed to drift apart.
Security and privacy
A device holding purchase documents contains more than it appears to: supplier names, prices, project names and sometimes customer details on a delivery note. Those devices leave the premises and are shared between crews. We therefore tie permissions to the user rather than the device, keep offline only what has not yet been processed, and make sure a lost device can be disconnected remotely.
On the administrative side there is a requirement that becomes stricter with ViDA. The original image of a receipt is your proof of purchase and must be kept unaltered alongside the data extracted from it, for the retention period set by the tax authority. We therefore store the image as it was captured and log who confirmed or changed each value. A system that only knows the final posting cannot show, during an audit, where that figure came from. How we handle security ourselves is set out in our information security policy; reports from outside come through our vulnerability disclosure policy.
Frequently asked questions about the receipts and approvals app
ViDA moves VAT information from a periodic return to a report per transaction. That removes the window in which missing documents could be added later. A receipt that only surfaces at month-end close is then too late, and for most businesses part of that paperwork originates outside the office.
Recognition suggests the amount, date, supplier and VAT, and that works well on clean receipts. We have a person confirm rather than posting automatically, because an error that has been posted has to be visibly corrected. Confirming takes a second and prevents that.
Yes, that is the starting point. Photo, integration and confirmation all happen locally and sync as soon as there is a connection, with each document showing whether it succeeded. Without this, you would miss precisely the places where most loose receipts arise.
Usually yes, and that's preferable to a second app on the same device. A field service app already has the login, the projects and offline working; capturing documents becomes part of it.
No, and that's deliberate. The app is an input channel; bookkeeping, tax returns and reporting stay in your existing package. What we build is the bridge between the moment a document is created and the system where it belongs.
Those are exactly why it pays to start early. Different VAT rates, different notations, and a counterparty that reports in another Member State. We capture the original image and have the user confirm it, so the bookkeeping can later determine how the transaction should be treated.
This app concerns the incoming side and documents created outside the office. The ViDA software concerns outgoing invoices under EN 16931 and per-transaction reporting. They share the same bookkeeping but not the same users.
That depends on the number of document types, whether approval is required and which package it needs to connect to. Capturing with a photo and integration is usually quick to become useful; recognition and the approval workflow cost more. We give a reasoned estimate after the discovery phase.
Receipts arriving too late?
Check in your last period close how many purchase documents were more than two weeks old by the time they were processed. That number is your problem to solve. We build this as a standalone app and as part of a broader custom app or custom software project.