What corporate card receipts really cost your company each month

A company's most expensive costs do not appear in the report. They have no line of their own, no name in the budget, and nobody asks about them at month-end. They are paid every month all the same.

Corporate card receipts are exactly that kind of cost. Below we calculate it to the end.

The danger of an invisible cost is that nobody ever decides to reduce it - because nobody ever sees it.

How it works today

A driver fills up. A supply manager buys goods. The facilities team picks up small items. In an average company that means around 30 receipts a day.

The receipts reach the accountant, sometimes daily, sometimes as a week's pile. The accountant sets aside dedicated time and performs two operations on every receipt:

• registers the receipt with the tax system, to claim the VAT credit
• then enters it into the accounting system, in most cases 1C

For an experienced accountant one receipt takes 5 minutes on average. That is a receipt with 1-2 line items. More items, more time.

First calculator: time

The arithmetic is simple:

• 30 receipts × 5 minutes = 150 minutes a day
• 150 minutes × 24 working days = 3,600 minutes

60 hours a month. On data entry alone. This is not accounting - it is copying.

How it works with Dobek AI

The process starts with the person holding the receipt, not with the accountant.

The cardholder scans the receipt's QR code in the mobile app for a card they have access to, enters the RRN and sends it for analysis. The rest is automatic: the receipt is registered with the tax system and lands in 1C as a finished document.

No paper reaches the accountant's desk. Their job narrows to review and approval.

The system runs in close to 20 companies today. The full cycle, from scan to document in 1C, takes 20 seconds on average.

• 30 receipts × 20 seconds = 10 minutes a day
• 10 minutes × 24 days = 240 minutes

4 hours a month.

The difference: 7 working days a month

60 hours - 4 hours = 56 hours.

Divide by an eight-hour day and you get 7 working days a month. Your accountant takes back a week and a half, every month, from a single function.

Converting it into money

Time is an abstraction for a manager. Money is not.

Say the accountant earns 8 million so'm and works 24 days. Substitute your own figure - the structure of the calculation does not change.

• 8,000,000 ÷ 24 = 333,000 so'm a day
• 333,000 × 7 days = 2.3 million so'm

So every month you pay 2.3 million so'm for receipt entry. Not for accounting expertise - for mechanical work. That is 28 million so'm a year.

The second leak: lost VAT

The first leak at least shows up in payroll. The second is far quieter.

If a receipt is not registered with the tax system in time, or is lost altogether, the VAT credit is gone. That money does not come back, and nobody looks for it - because the report has no line called losses.

Before joining us, our clients were losing 7-8 million so'm a month on average this way. Today that loss is down by 90% - up to 6 million so'm a month now comes back from the tax office.

Total

• Salary spent on mechanical work: 2.3 million so'm
• Recovered VAT: 6 million so'm

8.3 million so'm a month. Close to 100 million so'm a year.

The accountant's monthly salary is 8 million so'm.

One function covers an accountant's entire monthly salary and returns more on top.

And this is a quarter of the plan

Everything above concerns corporate card receipts only. The tariff includes three more functions, and each one is live today:

• Bank transactions - loading statements into the accounting system, 20 times faster than by hand
• Retail receipts - automatic entry from the tax system into 1C
• Invoice reconciliation - incoming and outgoing invoices are pulled from the tax database and 1C, matched, and delivered to the chief accountant as a finished report

We will open up their calculations in separate articles.

Where the numbers come from

• 30 receipts a day - average across our clients
• 5 minutes per receipt - manual work time for an experienced accountant, 1-2 line items
• 20 seconds per receipt - real average from the live system across nearly 20 companies, scan to document in 1C
• 24 working days a month - average for companies working half-day Saturdays
• Accountant salary of 8 million so'm - a placeholder, replace it with yours
• VAT losses of 7-8 million so'm - our own estimate, based on the state of things before clients joined

If your numbers differ, substitute them without changing the formula. The shape of the conclusion stays the same.

Conclusion

The point of this article is not to praise automation. The point is to make visible a line that does not exist in the report.

Open a calculator and put in your own numbers. If the total satisfies you, nothing needs to change.