1. Grant Your Assistant Access
Give your assistant access to your bookkeeping software (e.g., Freshbooks, QuickBooks, Zoho).
We recommend creating a new account for your assistant. Remember to grant this account only the minimum number of permissions required.
If you use spreadsheets, create an expense tracking template and share a view-only version with your assistant.
2. Set Up File Sharing
Use a shared Google Drive folder with subfolders for each tracking period or project. Your assistant will save receipts and invoices in the appropriate subfolders.
Things to consider:
- Format for titles (e.g., “YYYY-MM-DD Expense Report”)
- Destination for completed reports (e.g. “Completed Reports” folder)
3. Walk Them Through Your Current Process
Schedule a 30 minute to 1 hour video call to walk your assistant through your expense tracking process.
Share your screen and record the call. During the call, casually show some examples of how expenses are categorized and new entries are created.
Your assistant will take notes and reference this recorded video later.
Ask your assistant to turn this information (their notes and video) into a step-by-step written guide. You’ll then have clear documentation on this process for the future.
4. Set Goals
Your assistant can handle all of the following responsibilities (and more):
- Create entries for each receipt
- Label and categorize each entry
- Organize receipts into the correct folder
- Verify and double-check entries
- Compile entries into expense reports
- Alert you if expenses are unusual or are above a set limit
Be clear about which responsibilities you expect your assistant to handle.
If any responsibility is the highest priority, that is important to specify as well.
Also, if you have specific goals or metrics you want achieved, include this information as well. Also include any deadline needed to be hit, such as submitting all expense reports by Friday at 4pm.
5. Share Your Receipts
Make sure your assistant has access to all new incoming receipts.
For example, if receipts arrive in your inbox, your assistant can log into your email account for you as a delegate.
You can also choose to manually forward expense-related emails to your assistant’s email address.
For physical receipts, you can take pictures of these receipts with your phone and upload them to Google Drive. If they are infrequent, you can also email them one by one to your assistant directly.
6. Optional: Reconciliation
Some people use their assistant to help them reconcile financial records. To do this, you’ll need to give your assistant access to records such as your cash book, general ledger, bank statements, etc. Make sure they have “read only” permissions.
Ask your assistant to reconcile these records against monthly bank statements.
Once finished, they will send you the reconciliation statement directly or add it to your bookkeeping system.
7. Optional: Project-Based Expense Tracking
You can use your assistant to make sure projects remain within budget.
For each project, your assistant will generate a comprehensive expense report that will show all costs broken down by category.
If you regularly work with the same contractors or agencies for a given project, your assistant can provide a rate sheet listing the standard hourly or project rates for each of those vendors. They can also include a maximum budget per vendor and alert you if any vendor’s invoice is outside of budget.
To delegate this task, first create a spreadsheet with the information you’d like to track for each project.
Hop on a video call with your assistant, share your screen, and show them how to fill out the sheet. You only need to do a few examples to get them started.