Expense reports when your “team” is you and two contractors.

Most expense-management software is built for the company you don't have yet. Approval chains, policy engines, manager hierarchies, per-diem rules — all of it assumes a finance department, a controller, and a few hundred employees who need guardrails. If your "team" is you, a designer you pay monthly, and a developer who bills by the project, that machinery isn't a head start. It's overhead you'll spend a weekend configuring and then quietly stop using.

The actual problem at your size is much smaller, and worth naming precisely: a few people spend money on the business, and those spends need to land somewhere clean before tax season. That's it. Here's how to do that without pretending you're an enterprise.

What you actually need (and what you don't)

Strip an expense-report system down to what a tiny team genuinely uses and you're left with four things:

• Capture — a receipt gets photographed before it's lost in a jacket pocket.
• Categorise — it's tagged to something meaningful (software, travel, contractor tools) so the year-end total isn't one undifferentiated heap.
• A place it lands — somewhere you'll still be able to find it in eighteen months.
• A way to settle and track — so a contractor who paid for something gets reimbursed, and you know what the business actually spent.

What you don't need: multi-step approvals (you are the approver, and you already know what you bought), policy enforcement (you don't need software to tell three people the spending rules), or analytics dashboards built for a CFO. Those are answers to problems you don't have. Buying them now just means more setup and more monthly cost for the same four jobs above.

Let contractors submit receipts without access to your books

Here's the part that trips up small operators, because it's genuinely a little awkward. You want your contractors to submit their receipts — the Uber to the client meeting, the stock photos they bought for your project — so those costs are captured and you can reimburse them. But you very much do not want them seeing your bank balances, your other contractors' rates, or the rest of your books.

A lot of people solve this badly: receipts get WhatsApped to you as photos, you screenshot them into a folder, and the categorisation lives only in your head. It works until it doesn't — usually the week before filing, when you're trying to remember whether that ₹3,000 image you were sent in August was for the agency or the side project.

The clean version is a submitter setup: your contractors can drop a receipt in, tagged to a project, without any visibility into your finances. They contribute the one thing you need from them — the receipt and what it was for — and nothing about your money is exposed. This is exactly why Starlog lets people submit receipts for free without giving them access to the books: at a tiny scale, the bottleneck isn't approving expenses, it's just collecting them from the two other people who spend.

A monthly flow that takes fifteen minutes

You don't need a process document. You need a habit:

1. Everyone captures at the moment of spend. A receipt photographed when it's handed over never becomes a reconstruction later. Make this the one rule.
2. Tag it to a project or category right then. Five seconds of "what was this" beats an hour of guessing in March.
3. Once a month, you review. Open the month's captures, check anything ambiguous, and reimburse the contractors for what they fronted. Fifteen minutes if the capture habit held.
4. It's already filed. If your receipts land somewhere organised as they come in, "doing the expense report" stops being an event. It's just the monthly review.

The whole point is that the work is distributed into tiny moments — a photo here, a tag there — instead of saved up into one miserable session.

When you'd actually outgrow this

Be honest with yourself about the threshold, because over-buying early is the more common mistake. You'd genuinely benefit from heavier expense software when you have real employees (not contractors) spending on company cards, when you need enforced approval before money goes out, or when a finance hire needs audit trails and policy controls. That's a team of fifteen or twenty with a corporate card programme — not three people and a shared goal.

Until then, capturing cleanly, tagging as you go, and reviewing once a month will carry you through tax season with room to spare. The tool matters less than the habit; what matters is that the receipt gets caught and lands somewhere you'll find it.