Save the month-end hunt for receipts. Your team puts receipts and business miles on one claim, you approve it once, and the bill lands in Xero or QuickBooks.
SparkReceipt is expenses software for small UK teams. Whoever paid for a business cost out of their own pocket puts the receipts and business journeys on an expense claim, a Supervisor, Admin, or Owner approves it, and you mark it paid once the money has gone across.
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The same receipts and the same team, sorted in a fraction of the time
The person who paid starts a new claim and adds the expenses they paid themselves and their completed business journeys. Expenses marked as paid by the company stay off claims, so nothing is paid back twice.
They submit the claim, and everyone who can approve it gets a push notification and an email. A Supervisor, Admin, or Owner approves it in one step, or rejects it with a reason the claimant can fix.
Pay the person back by bank transfer or through payroll, then mark the claim paid with the date and a reference. Publish the approved claim to Xero or QuickBooks Online as one bill, or export it as PDF, Excel, or CSV.
In SparkReceipt's expenses software, an expense claim gathers everything one person is owed for a trip, a project, or a month. Add the receipts they paid with their own card or cash, photographed on a phone or picked up from their inbox, and add the business journeys they drove from the mileage tracker. Each journey is priced at the mileage rate on your account, and the claim shows the miles and the rate behind the amount.
A claim can mix currencies, with a separate total for each one, so a trip to a supplier in Europe needs no conversion by hand. An expense that is only partly for business shows its business use, so the approver sees the split before saying yes. Each receipt can sit on one claim only, which keeps the same cost from being paid back twice.
A team of five does not need the approval chains that large expenses software is built around. It needs someone with the authority to say yes and a record of who said it. In SparkReceipt a Supervisor, Admin, or Owner approves each claim, from the claim itself or straight from the list. If something is wrong, they reject it with a reason, and the claimant reopens it, fixes it, and submits it again.
Every claim keeps a history of who created it, submitted it, approved it, sent it back, and marked it paid. Admins and the Owner can approve their own claims. A Supervisor can't, so another approver signs off on theirs. Contributors see only their own claims, and your accountant joins free and sees all of them.
Each claimant saves their payout details once: account holder, account number or IBAN, sort code or BIC, and bank name. The claim keeps a copy when it is submitted, and only the claimant and the people who review the claim can see it. Account numbers are stored encrypted.
When you have paid the person back, by Faster Payment or with the next payroll run, open the claim and mark it paid with the date and a payment reference. The claimant gets a notification, and the claim moves to Paid. SparkReceipt doesn't move the money itself. Like good expenses software should, it keeps the record of what was owed, who approved it, and when it was settled.
An approved claim publishes to Xero or QuickBooks Online as one unpaid bill, payable to the person who made the claim. Each receipt goes on its own line with its category and tax, the receipt images are attached, and journeys are booked to the mileage expense category you choose. In Xero the claim arrives as a regular bill, separate from Xero's own Expenses feature. The bill carries the claim number, so your accountant can trace it back.
On FreeAgent or Sage? Export the claim as a PDF with every receipt after the summary, or as Excel or CSV, and record it there. Your expense reports stay as they are: reports cover where the money went, and claims cover what the business owes the people who spent it.
Directors of small limited companies pay for business costs on a personal card all the time: the train fare, the software subscription, the client lunch. An expense claim gives you a clean record of what the company owes you. Add those receipts and the business miles you drove in your own car, submit the claim, approve it yourself as the Owner, and mark it paid once the company has transferred the money.
The claim's PDF and its history show exactly what was paid back and when. Until the company pays you, your accountant may show the amount on your director's loan account, and the claim gives them the list behind it. Your accountant decides how each cost is treated for Corporation Tax.
An expense claim is how a business pays back someone who covered a business cost with their own money: the rail ticket booked on a personal card, the parking at a client's site, the miles driven in their own car. The process has the same four steps in every business. Someone collects the proof, someone approves the claim, someone pays the money, and the books record it. Expenses software keeps all four in one place, so nothing depends on memory or a shared spreadsheet.
In a team of three to twenty people, the hard part is rarely the approval. It is the paper. Receipts get lost before anyone asks for them, mileage gets estimated after the fact, and the owner pays back a total without knowing what is in it. SparkReceipt's expenses software starts with the receipt: every expense is scanned and read by AI the moment it is captured, VAT included, every journey is logged with its distance, and an expense claim gathers the ones a person paid for. The approval and the payment record sit on top of proof that already exists.
A simple expense claims process works for most small UK businesses, with or without expenses software:
When an employee uses their own car for work, most businesses pay them a mileage allowance. HMRC's approved mileage rates for cars and vans are 55p a mile for the first 10,000 business miles in a tax year from 6 April 2026, and 25p a mile after that. Paying up to the approved amount means nothing to report to HMRC. Paying more means the excess goes on the employee's P11D and is taxed through payroll.
In SparkReceipt's expenses software you set the mileage rate on the account or for each vehicle, plus a passenger rate if you pay one, and every journey on a claim shows its miles multiplied by that rate. The mileage log behind the claim, with the date, route, distance, and purpose of each journey, is what your accountant and HMRC ask for. Our guide to HMRC mileage allowance covers the rules in more detail.
Large companies buy travel and expense suites with company cards, policy engines, and payment runs. A small team needs less, and the things it needs are easy to check:
What SparkReceipt leaves out is deliberate. There are no multi-level approval chains, spending limits, policy rules, subsistence or overnight allowance calculations, or company cards, and SparkReceipt doesn't send payments. If your team needs those, a larger expense management platform is the better fit. Our comparison with Expensify sets out the difference.
The two are related and easy to mix up. An expense report in SparkReceipt is an export: a PDF, Excel, or CSV of any set of expenses, for your accountant, a client, or your own records. An expense claim is a request to be paid back. It belongs to one person, holds only what they paid for, goes through approval, and ends when it is marked paid. Use reports to see where the money went. Use claims, the part of this expenses software built for paying people back, to settle what the business owes the people who spent it.
Claims, approval, mileage, and publishing to Xero or QuickBooks Online on both plans. Try them in the 7-day free trial and cancel any time.
Your first user is included. Each extra user: £0.75/month, billed £9 annually.
Your accountant joins free
The essentials for keeping your receipts and expenses organised.
Total for 1 user · £59.00 billed annually
+ VAT/GST where applicable
Get Started7-day free trial
50 documents / month
For receipts and invoices
For small businesses with 1 to 40 people.
Total for 1 user · £109.00 billed annually
+ VAT/GST where applicable
Get Started7-day free trial
Unlimited documents*
Everything in Pro, plus:
Joel Ojala, co-founder, sets up SparkReceipt with you, tailored to how you work.
+ Elite for 1 user: £9.08/mo, billed annually
£459.00 today, then £109.00 a year
+ VAT/GST where applicable
Get set up with JoelAnnual plan only · No free trial
Everything in Elite
Plus a 60-minute session with Joel and one follow-up. In the session:
Unlimited linked accounts on every plan.
Unlimited document scanning on Elite is subject to fair use. Bank statement extraction uses monthly renewable credits. Historical email imports include a free allowance; larger imports use credits, with the cost shown before you start.
“Thanks to you, I'm actually looking forward to my year end FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER, when I can surprise my accountant with my completed accounts with a week or so off the end of the year!”
Abigail Dombey
Net Zero Associates Ltd · United Kingdom
“I used to send my accountant a bag of slips every month hoping they capture everything in order for me to be refunded for business expenses. With SparkReceipt I now have a realtime view of how much the business owes me and I have a clear picture for what business expenses I pay for.”
Daniel Esterhuizen
Esterhuizen Consulting · South Africa
Join 38,283 businesses that chose SparkReceipt — 4,620,044 receipts processed and counting.
Get StartedAn expense claim is a request from one person to be paid back for business costs they covered with their own money. In SparkReceipt it holds the receipts they paid themselves and their business journeys, goes to an approver, and is marked paid once the money has been paid back.
Ask each employee to capture receipts as they spend, then submit the ones they paid themselves on an expense claim, together with their business journeys. A Supervisor, Admin, or Owner approves the claim, you pay the employee by bank transfer or through payroll, and you mark the claim paid. The approved claim can go to Xero or QuickBooks Online as one bill.
No. SparkReceipt doesn't move money. You pay the person back the way you already do, by Faster Payment, BACS, or with payroll, and then record the payment on the claim with the date and an optional reference. The claimant gets a notification when the claim is marked paid.
Yes. Completed business journeys from the mileage tracker go on the claim next to the receipts. Each journey is priced at your vehicle or account mileage rate, plus any passenger rate, and the claim shows the miles and the rate behind the amount. HMRC's approved rate for cars and vans is 55p a mile for the first 10,000 business miles from 6 April 2026.
A Supervisor, Admin, or the Owner can approve, reject, and mark as paid other people's claims. Admins and the Owner can also approve their own. A Supervisor can't approve their own claim, so someone else signs off on it.
Publish the approved claim from SparkReceipt. It arrives in Xero as one unpaid bill payable to the employee, with each receipt as a line and the receipt images attached, and journeys booked to your mileage expense category. It is a regular bill, separate from Xero's own Expenses feature. When you pay the employee, record the payment against that bill in Xero.
Expense claims publish to Xero and QuickBooks Online. FreeAgent and Sage can't take a claim, so export it as a PDF with the receipts, or as Excel or CSV, and record it there. Your everyday expenses still publish to FreeAgent and Sage as usual.
Creating and submitting expense claims is part of the expenses software in Pro and Elite, and you can try it in the 7-day free trial. Every plan includes 1 user, you add teammates for a flat fee per user, and your accountant joins free.
Yes. Invite your accountant with the Accountant role at no cost. They see every claim in the account, can export claims as PDF, Excel, or CSV, and can publish approved claims to your accounting software.
It suits small UK teams, sole traders with helpers, and limited company directors who want receipts, mileage, approval, and a bill in Xero or QuickBooks Online in one place, with one approval step and nothing extra to pay per claim. If you need multi-level approvals, spending policies, company cards, or payments sent from the tool, a larger platform suits you better than this expenses software.
Log business journeys and price them at your rate
Scan receipts with AI in seconds
Generate reports in PDF, Excel, or CSV
Send approved claims to Xero as bills
Publish approved claims as bills with receipts attached
Track your own work expenses on the go
Keep the digital records MTD asks for
