Self-employed expense tracking for Self Assessment
A self-employed expense tracker your AI can read: Era files receipts and invoices, totals them by tag and has your Self Assessment figures ready to check.
Era works as a self-employed expense tracker and receipt scanner that your AI assistant can read. Photograph a receipt or upload an invoice, and Era reads the supplier, date and total, files it under your tags and cites its source, so Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini can total your expenses for Self Assessment.
How do you track expenses as a sole trader?
Upload each receipt or invoice by link when you get it, tag it with a tag you already use, and let Era read it. Your assistant can then total spending by tag, by month or by supplier, and compare the receipts with the payments in your business and personal accounts.
The routine is a photo at the till and a tag. At the end of the quarter, a prompt such as "Use Era. Total my receipts tagged 'travel' this quarter" returns a figure with the list behind it. You do the thinking about what is allowable; the adding up is done.
Can Era replace a receipt scanner app?
For many people, yes. Era reads receipts, invoices and bills as document kinds of their own, pulls out the supplier, date, amounts and VAT lines where they are shown, and keeps a citation for each value. The advantage over a stand-alone scanner is that your assistant can join the receipts to your bank transactions.
That joining is the part a scanner can't do. Ask which card payments have no receipt and your assistant lists them from your accounts, so you chase the missing paper while the purchase is still fresh.
What can you ask about your expenses?
Anything you would otherwise answer with a spreadsheet: totals by category, the biggest supplier, whether a cost is recurring and what changed from last quarter. Your assistant answers from the extracted values and your transactions together, and each answer can point back to the receipt it relies on.
Use Era. Which suppliers did I pay more than £500 in total this tax year, and do I have an invoice from each?
Use Era. Compare my expenses this quarter with last quarter by tag.
Keep the answers where you can find them. Facts you promote, such as a monthly software cost, join Era's memory, so every assistant knows them.
Where does this fit into Self Assessment?
It feeds it. The online deadline for the 2025 to 2026 return is 31 January 2027, and your totals by tag are the figures you check against your return before you file. The receipts behind each total are a click away, so every number on the return has a document you can show.
You file at gov.uk. For what to keep and why, read Self Assessment receipts: what to keep.
If some accounts aren't linked, upload their statements and import the transactions into a manual account, so your expenses are complete. How to add manual accounts shows the first step.
Who else can see your records?
Only the people you choose. Documents live in your own space or a shared one, and a share link for an accountant opens only for a signed-in Era user and expires after the lifetime you set. You can revoke a link sooner, and a document you no longer need can be archived or deleted for good.
See pricing for how many documents each tier holds.
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