IQ Books Mobile: Free Receipt Capture, Mileage and Voice Invoicing on Your Phone

Bookkeeping software has always assumed you are sitting down. The ledger lives on a screen at a desk, and everything that happens away from the desk, which for a tradesperson, a landlord or a freelancer is most of the working day, gets scribbled down, stuffed in a glovebox or simply forgotten until month end.

IQ Books Mobile is built on the opposite assumption: the useful moment is the moment it happens. The receipt exists in your hand at the builders' merchant. The journey happens while you drive it. The price is agreed while you are standing in the customer's garden. The app's job is to catch each of those moments in a few seconds, feed them into the same double-entry ledger that IQ Books keeps for you, and then get out of your way.

Free receipt capture that files itself

Every bookkeeping app has a camera button. The difference is what happens after the shutter. In IQ Books Mobile, a photographed receipt joins a queue on the device itself, which means it works in a basement, a van or a site cabin with no signal, and uploads when the connection comes back. You can capture up to twenty in one go, share a receipt straight into the app from your phone's share sheet, or forward the PDF a supplier emailed you.

Then RiQ reads it. Supplier, date, VAT and total are extracted and assembled into a draft bill, with a confidence mark against every field so you can see exactly what the AI was sure about and what deserves a glance. The original photo stays attached to the bill, which is precisely what HMRC wants from digital records. You review, save, done. No typing, no shoebox, no "receipts weekend" in January.

The honest pricing note: photographing and queueing receipts is free on every tier, including the free one. The AI extraction costs 10 credits per receipt, which on the £5 a month Starter plan works out at 500 scanned receipts a month, more than most small businesses see in a quarter.

Mileage that logs itself while you drive

HMRC's approved mileage rates are more generous than ever, 55p a mile for the first 10,000 business miles from April 2026 (the first rise since 2011) and 25p after that, and mostly unclaimed, because claiming them means remembering every journey. A notebook in the door pocket is not a system.

In the app, one tap starts a journey. GPS traces the route in the background, and the trip carries on recording even if you switch apps or the screen locks. When you arrive, the app turns distance into money at the correct rate and drafts the expense claim. It tracks your year-to-date mileage, so when you cross the 10,000-mile threshold mid-year the rate steps from 55p to 25p on its own, which is the detail that quietly goes wrong in most spreadsheets. Journeys you drive often can be saved and re-logged with a tap.

The sixty-second invoice: speak it, send it, get paid

Here is the scenario the app was really built for. A builder finishes walking a job with a customer, and they agree £1,850 for the garden wall, there and then, in the garden. In the old world, that agreement waits until the evening, or the weekend, or whenever the laptop next opens, and every day it waits is a day closer to being haggled, forgotten or "can you just knock a bit off".

In IQ Books Mobile, the builder holds the mic button and says: "Raise an invoice for Dave Mercer for £1,850 for the garden wall and email it with a payment link."

RiQ does not just fire off actions. It shows its working: a confirmation card listing every step it is about to take, in plain English, with the exact amount. The builder taps Approve. The customer record is created, the invoice is raised and issued into the ledger, and an email lands in Dave's inbox with a secure link to a hosted invoice page where he can pay by card on the spot.

And here is the part that saves the evening admin as well as the morning's: when Dave pays, the payment is recorded against that invoice automatically. Money in the bank, invoice marked paid, payment allocated, and a push notification on the builder's phone to say so, often before the van has left the street. There is no "must remember to mark that one as paid" pile, because the reconciliation happened the moment the card was charged.

If you would rather not talk to your phone in front of a customer, the same instruction typed into RiQ's chat is free, and the classic way (a form with a customer picker, line items and VAT handled for you) is two taps from the home screen. You can even show a QR code and take payment in person.

Bookkeeping that does itself while you are out

The receipts, the miles and the invoices all feed the same ledger, and the ledger largely runs itself. Bank transactions arrive in a review inbox already coded: IQ Books applies your bank rules and history, and a tap on the CodeIQ card runs the full eight-phase coding pipeline over whatever is waiting, so a week of trading becomes a thirty-second review at the bus stop. Each suggestion carries its confidence and the method that produced it, you confirm the lot with one tap, and drafts that match an outstanding invoice are recorded as invoice payments rather than loose income, so the books stay reconciled rather than merely tidy.

Around that core there is more than you would expect from a companion app, because it is not a companion app; it is IQ Books. Profit and loss, VAT owed and five other reports with date presets. An aged debtors list built for chasing, one tap from the ageing bars on the home screen. Expense claim approvals for teams, protected by your fingerprint. A home-screen widget with today's position. And push notifications for the moments you actually care about: an invoice getting paid, a claim waiting for approval, drafts building up on a Monday morning.

What it costs

The app is free, and it signs into the same account as the rest of IQ Books. On the free tier you get one organisation with the bank-first feature set, and receipt photographing and queueing costs nothing. AI receipt reading is 10 credits per scan, and features like invoicing and expenses sit on the paid IQ Suite plans, which start at £5 a month and include CodeIQ, ReconcileIQ and LedgerIQ as well. There is no separate app subscription and nothing to buy twice.