How to automate expense management in Bullet

Key takeaways

• Bullet is accounting, invoicing, VAT and payroll designed for Irish small businesses.
• Expenses are recorded as bills with who paid, expense category and VAT rate; staff-paid amounts are reimbursed through payroll.
• Bullet includes receipt capture in its mobile app, mileage tracking and bank feeds.
• Vergo proposes category and VAT, texts cardholders for receipts and records bills or journals through the API.

Where should you go next?

• Vergo's Bullet integration
• What expense management software integrates with Bullet?
• Get started with Vergo

How do you automate expense management in Bullet, step by step?

1. Enable API access. It is enabled once in your Bullet environment; Vergo does the rest.
2. Keep your cards. Connecting your existing cards involves no card applications, no re-issuing and no banking change.
3. Collect receipts by text. Employees handle everything by text message — no app to download, no portal login — and Vergo chases missing receipts itself instead of waiting for a report.
4. Propose category and VAT. Vergo suggests the expense category and Irish VAT rate for each line, with the reason.
5. Record in Bullet. Once API access is enabled, Vergo records coded spend in Bullet as bills or manual journal entries through Bullet's API.

What does Bullet need on each card purchase?

• Expense category.
• VAT rate for the Irish VAT return.
• Supplier.
• Who paid: the business card, or an employee to reimburse.
• Receipt.

Where does Bullet stop and automation start?

Bullet keeps small business bookkeeping simple: scan a receipt, record who paid, and reimbursements join the next payroll run. Choosing the category and VAT rate, and getting receipts from staff who are out on jobs, is still the owner's or bookkeeper's job. Vergo reads the receipt itself, line by line, and predicts the coding from what was actually bought, not just the vendor name on the header.

A practical example

A Cork-based catering company on Bullet has cards with two event managers. One buys ice, disposable cutlery and parking at a venue. Vergo texts for the receipts, proposes food costs and consumables with the right VAT rates and travel for the parking, and the owner confirms before the bills are recorded in Bullet.

How Vergo handles this

Vergo proposes the coding by inference from your own accounting structure and history — no rule library to build, no keyword lists to maintain, and new vendors are coded on first sight. For a Bullet business, that means your own categories and VAT treatment. Card spend, employee reimbursements and AP invoices run through one coding model — same coding, same review, one reconciliation — and payment stays on the rails you already use.