How it works

Several receipts are read one after another rather than all together. That is a second or two slower, and it stops a bulk drop of forty receipts hitting a rate limit halfway through.

Checking a reading against a redrawing of that same reading proves nothing. A smudged total misread by one digit is exactly what this step exists to catch.

If a receipt covers several things — a servo docket with fuel and a coffee on it — tick only the lines that apply, and the ones you leave come back as their own expense to file separately.

A receipt in a foreign currency can be settled here if you already know what your bank charged, or filed as pending and settled later from the expense itself.

The pile is the first question here and the easiest to get wrong. Open the expense afterwards and move it — the receipt, the note and everything else go with it, and the screen says what the move changes before it does it.

Not now, at the top of the card and again at the foot, puts a receipt back without filing or throwing it away — for the invoice you cannot answer for until you have checked something. It stays in the list underneath, marked as put back, with a Review button to pick it up again. It stays put back until you do: closing the app is not a change of mind.

The month a receipt lands on is a separate question from the date it was spent: an August receipt that turns up in October belongs on October’s claim, and the expense still reads August.

The export is four things, and which one depends on who is receiving it. One PDF — the figures, then every receipt behind them — is the one to send. A zip has the same contents as separate files, for somebody who needs the sheet to work in. The spreadsheet on its own, or a CSV, carry the figures with no receipts at all, for when those have already gone or are going into somebody else’s system.

Upload your own claim form under Work Expenses Template and the export fills a copy of yours instead of a generic sheet.

A return takes one figure per category; a rental schedule takes one figure per category per property. Two houses added together is a schedule nobody can check.

It shows the lines that are not a deduction in the year they were spent — capital works are written off over decades, and travel to a residential rental has not been deductible since 1 July 2017 — and leaves both out of the figure you copy across rather than hiding them. It also applies your ownership share, because a property held half each is declared by each owner in their share, and one filed at 100% by both is the most common way this goes wrong.

GST is recorded as printed and treated as part of the cost rather than as a credit, because residential rent is input-taxed and there is generally nothing to claim back.

The other three sections are all answers to the same question — who is paying this back. This is the one where nobody is, and keeping it apart is what stops it being counted: a personal receipt is not totalled into a claim, never leaves in an export to an employer, and a tank of fuel filed here does not reach the vehicle logbook.

It has no categories, because an ATO line exists to fill a box on a schedule and this section has no schedule. The confirmation screen asks which folder instead — the same trade work expenses make, where the question is which month.

Archiving a folder keeps everything in it and takes it off the list. The last one will not archive, because a section with nowhere to file into is a section that refuses receipts.

The receipts were never the hard part of a work trip. What gets asked about is why you went, how many nights, and past six of them what you did each day — and none of that is on any document.

If part of the trip was private, say so and only that share is claimed, with the full figure left on screen beside it.

Somebody filling this in a fortnight later usually knows they were at the site all morning and not that it was three hours forty. A remembered start with an honest blank beats a confident invention.

The app does the arithmetic. What counts depends on facts only you know, and commuting between home and a regular workplace generally is not one of them.

With your own Dropbox, files go into your account and the authorisation never leaves your browser — nothing on the Zilda side holds a key, so nothing on the Zilda side can read them.

With hosted storage there is nothing to connect and being signed in is the credential. Files are encrypted in this browser before they go, so the storage provider only ever holds sealed bytes — but by default the key that opens them is Zilda’s, and that is the cost of the convenience.

End-to-end encryption removes that last part. Turn it on from the Storage page and the key is made on your device and never leaves it: unlock with the fingerprint, face or PIN your device already uses, or with a passphrase if you would rather. From then on Zilda holds the key only in a form it cannot open. You are given a recovery key to save, and it is the only way back if you lose every device — nobody at Zilda can reset it. All of this is set out in section 6 of the privacy policy.

Anything you email in passes through Zilda regardless of which you chose — section 7 explains why.

On the claim puts it at the foot of the figures, above your printed name and the date — where a claim form asks to be signed. On every pageadds a small initial at the foot of every receipt behind it, for an employer who wants each page marked. Nowhere draws nothing while keeping the mark saved, which is what you want when the form you are sending carries its own signature block.

Every other screen shows what is there now, so a receipt that has gone leaves a blank space — and a blank space cannot tell you whether you filed it, threw it away, or are looking at the wrong device. The history says which, and says when.

It names the device where it can, because that is often the whole answer. A receipt you brought in from your expense email is waiting on the device you brought it in on — and the emailed copy is deleted at that moment, so the list of what arrived by email will not show it again. The receipt itself reaches your other devices: a receipt that has been read and not filed appears everywhere you sign in, saying which device read it, and filing it anywhere takes it off all of them.

Each line is written when the thing happens and never rewritten, which is what lets a line about a deleted expense still name it. It is part of your ledger, so it is kept and encrypted exactly as your expenses are, it reaches your other devices, and it is not reported to anybody. The most recent thousand lines are kept.