Expense claims and receipts for volunteer-run groups
Expense claims and receipts for volunteer-run groups is a SaaS idea for treasurers of community groups, small charities and clubs that run on grants, priced to test at $12 a month per group. Receipts arrive crumpled in envelopes or as blurry photos in a group chat, weeks after the spend. With it, volunteers snap a receipt and claim the money back, the treasurer approves it, and spending is tracked against each grant.
. A starting point we wrote, not market research: run the 7-day test before you build.
What problem does it solve?
Receipts arrive crumpled in envelopes or as blurry photos in a group chat, weeks after the spend. The treasurer chases them by hand, and grant reports need evidence nobody can find.
Why now: Petty cash is fading, so volunteers pay on their own cards and need a quick, fair way to claim back.
What do they use today?
Most groups keep receipts in a folder at the treasurer’s home and the accounts in one spreadsheet. Working out which spending belongs to which grant is left until a funder asks for a report.
How does it work?
A volunteer buys supplies for a workshop, photographs the receipt on their phone and submits a claim with the amount and a budget line. The treasurer reviews it, approves it or rejects it with a note, and marks it paid once the bank transfer is made. Spending is shown by grant and budget line, and an export with the receipts is ready for the accounts and funders.
What goes in the first version?
- Claims with a receipt photo, an amount and a budget line
- Treasurer approval, with a note on rejected claims
- Claims marked paid after the bank transfer
- Spending by grant and budget line
- An export with receipts for the accounts and funders
Who pays, and how much?
- Who pays
- Treasurers of community groups, small charities and clubs that run on grants
- Price to test
- $12 a month per group
Volunteer groups have small budgets and only a few people who handle money, so a flat monthly price per group is easy for a committee to agree. Volunteers who claim back are not charged separately.
How to test it in 7 days
- 1Ask five treasurers how they collect receipts and what slows their year-end accounts.
- 2Read treasurer and charity finance groups on Facebook for complaints about missing receipts.
- 3Offer two groups a free quarter of claims in return for weekly feedback.
Where to find the first customers
- Treasurer and charity finance groups on Facebook
- Local support bodies for voluntary groups
- Independent examiners and accountants who check small charity accounts
What are the risks?
- Accounting tools include receipt capture, so the angle is volunteers and grant reporting.
- Volunteer groups have tiny budgets, so the price must stay low.
How to build it on shipanysaas
5 of the parts it needs are already in the kit, the phone app with the All-in plan. Get the kit, open it in Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, and paste the starting prompt.
- Already in the kit
- Teams and roles
- Billing
- Emails
- In-app notifications
- Phone app with All-in
- You build
- Claim form with receipt photos
- Approval flow and paid status
- Spending report by grant
See the starting prompt
You are in a fresh copy of the shipanysaas starter kit, a pnpm and Turborepo monorepo: the Next.js web app is in apps/web and the Supabase database, with its migrations, in apps/web/supabase; with the All-in plan, the Expo phone app is in apps/native. Help me build the first version of Expense claims and receipts for volunteer-run groups. Read AGENTS.md first, then the AGENTS.md in every folder you work in: the kit's rules there win over your defaults. When a skill in .agents/skills (also in .claude/skills and .cursor/skills) matches a task, use it. ## The product - What it does: Volunteers snap a receipt and claim the money back, the treasurer approves it, and spending is tracked against each grant. - Who pays: Treasurers of community groups, small charities and clubs that run on grants - Their problem: Receipts arrive crumpled in envelopes or as blurry photos in a group chat, weeks after the spend. The treasurer chases them by hand, and grant reports need evidence nobody can find. - Price to test: $12 a month per group (a plan in apps/web/config/billing.config.ts) ## Build only this first version 1. Claims with a receipt photo, an amount and a budget line 2. Treasurer approval, with a note on rejected claims 3. Claims marked paid after the bank transfer 4. Spending by grant and budget line 5. An export with receipts for the accounts and funders ## Already in the kit: reuse it, never rebuild it - Teams and roles: team accounts with members, roles and invitations - Billing: Stripe or Lemon Squeezy subscriptions, per seat or usage-based, and one-off payments - Emails: transactional email through Resend or Nodemailer - In-app notifications: a notifications bell in the web app - Phone app: an iPhone, iPad and Android app on the same backend (All-in plan) ## New code it needs - Claim form with receipt photos - Approval flow and paid status - Spending report by grant ## How to work 1. Plan first: list the database tables (with row-level security, so each team only sees its own rows), the pages and the server actions for the first feature. Then stop and wait for my OK. 2. Build one feature at a time with the kit's own UI and form components, with a migration for every schema change and user-facing text in the translation files. 3. After each feature, run the verification steps in AGENTS.md, fix what they find, and tell me what you built and what comes next. ## Rules - Ask me before you add a dependency, delete a file, or change sign-in, billing or the admin panel. - Leave the parts of the kit this product doesn't use as they are. - If apps/native is not in your copy (the Starter plan), build the web app only. Done when every first-version feature works for a signed-in team and the AGENTS.md checks pass.
Guides for the parts it uses
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