GST, Receipts, and Automating the Little Things
So, at the end of this month, GST is due. Even though we’ve been putting aside GST every week to avoid surprises… guess what? We’re surprised.
It’s a whopper of a bill. In some ways, that’s good — it shows how much work we’ve been getting through. But it also reminds me: keep every receipt, claim, claim, claim.
Back in my corporate days, I had to expense everything on business trips. Taking photos of receipts became second nature. Now I need to get back into that habit — which is fine, because my brain tends to treat it like a game.
Cassandra? Not so much. So when it comes to reconciling, I’m that guy:
“Where’s that receipt? Why didn’t you just take a photo?”
Yes, I am that annoying.
The process itself is simple: take a photo of the receipt, email it to Hubdoc, and it does the rest — reads the receipt, stores it in Xero, and remembers the details. Once it learns a specific company or invoice, it automatically fills in the rest.
Yet people often undervalue this mahi. I asked Cassandra how many hours she spends around the 20th of each month looking for invoices or receipts and figuring out what’s due. She said at least four hours.
Four hours a month doesn’t sound like much… but over a year, that’s more than 40 hours. And that’s just for our little business. Imagine a business ten times this size without automation.
How long did it take to set up? Probably around two hours. Keep in mind I know my way around systems and like a challenge. The trickiest part was automating specific email forwards — not hard, just Google making life unnecessarily complicated.
My goal is simple: automate all the little things — the hidden work that eats up hours. Eventually, that frees up time to focus on growing the business, not just working in it. Systems are what allow a business to scale.
We’re making slow progress, but an hour saved here and an hour saved there adds up. And it means more time for things like… turning this blog into an AI-generated video.
(Yes, I know — my brain really does treat this like a game.)
With a bit of time freed up thanks to the automation we set up, we figured we’d let AI have a crack at turning this blog into a video. This is what it came back with — unedited