How it works

Capture is deliberately effortless. Checking is deliberately strict. That combination is the whole product.

Getting invoices in

Merchant direct

Your account gets an address like yourname-7f2@in.usefootings.co.uk. Ask your merchant's accounts team to add it as a second recipient — you keep receiving your own copy. We draft the email; you send it. Ten minutes once per merchant, then that merchant is automatic for the rest of the build.

Forwarding

Forward anything that arrives in your own inbox to the same address. No setup, works with every supplier including one-off local trades.

Photograph

For counter dockets and paper. The photo saves immediately — reading the document happens afterwards, so a poor signal at the yard never loses an invoice.

Statements are never counted. A merchant statement lists invoices you've already added, so extracting one would double your claim for that month. We identify and skip them before they reach your records.

What gets checked

Two separate questions, because they have different answers and different fixes.

Is the document valid?

Supplier name and VAT number, invoice number and date, your name, and net, VAT and gross shown separately. A till receipt or pro-forma doesn't qualify. These are fixable — the merchant reissues.

Is the item claimable?

Checked against HMRC's published list. Some items are conditional — plant is claimable with an operator and not without — so we ask rather than guess. These aren't fixable; they just don't go in.

A perfectly valid invoice can contain something you can't claim, and a defective invoice can be full of things you can. Treating those as one question is how claims go wrong.

When something's unclear

Not everything has a clean answer, and pretending otherwise would be worse than useless. Anything uncertain is held rather than guessed, and routed to whoever can actually answer it.

You answer

Simple questions of fact only you know. Did the digger come with a driver? Is the blind manual or electric?

The merchant answers

Document defects. We draft the email, you send it, the corrected invoice replaces the original automatically.

We look at it

Bundled supplies, invoices in someone else's name, anything where the treatment isn't obvious from the document.

A VAT specialist adjudicates

Genuinely novel cases. The answer becomes a rule, so nobody hits that question cold again.

At the end

When your build completes, the schedule is already built. You get an invoice schedule in the order HMRC's form expects, a reconciliation showing credits and anything superseded, your document archive indexed to match, and a note of any item resolved by assertion rather than fact — so you know what HMRC might query.

You submit it, not us. Footings prepares and organises your claim. Submitting on your behalf would make us your agent, which is a different thing with different obligations. You stay in control of what goes to HMRC.