From a wallet full of receipts to an expense report
Most expense forms ask for the same few details from every receipt: where you spent the money, when, how much tax was included, and the total. Copying those by hand from crumpled paper is slow and easy to get wrong, especially after a trip that left you with a dozen taxi, hotel and meal receipts.
Receipt mode reads the photo and sorts what it finds into labeled fields and line items, so you check each value against the image instead of typing it. It’s built for personal spending: claiming work expenses back from an employer, tracking costs as a freelancer, or keeping a household budget. If you process supplier bills for a business, the invoice OCR page covers due dates, tax IDs and bookkeeping exports.
What a scanned receipt turns into
A receipt comes out in two parts. The fields hold the summary:
- Business, address and contact details from the top of the receipt
- Date and time of purchase, and the receipt number if one is printed
- Subtotal, discount, tax, tip and total
- Amount paid and change, from the card or cash lines at the bottom
The line items hold what you bought, each with a quantity, description, unit price and amount. For example, a line printed as 2 Flat white 3.50 7.00 is split into a quantity of 2, the description “Flat white”, a unit price of 3.50 and an amount of 7.00.
You can edit every field and every item before you export, so a wrong digit is a quick fix rather than a reason to start over.
Photographing faded thermal paper
Most till receipts are printed on thermal paper, which fades with heat, sunlight and time. Faint gray print is the most common reason receipt text gets misread, so a few habits help:
- Capture receipts early. A photo taken on the day of purchase beats one taken at the end of the quarter.
- Use a dark, plain background. White paper on a dark table stands out clearly and is easy to crop.
- Flatten curls and folds. Hold the ends down, or press the receipt under a book for a minute. A crease running through a row of numbers is a common cause of wrong digits.
- Avoid glare and shadows. Light from the side rather than straight above stops the paper from reflecting a bright spot and keeps your phone’s shadow off the text.
- Fill the frame. Get close enough that the smallest print is easy to read on your screen.
Auto improve evens out lighting and boosts contrast on its own, and lists the steps it took. If a receipt is still faint, raise the contrast or try black & white, then switch to the cleaned-up view to make sure lighter digits haven’t disappeared. A receipt photographed at an angle can be squared up with the four-corner straighten tool. There’s more general advice in how to get accurate OCR results.
Check these numbers before you submit
Clear printed receipts usually read well, but a misread digit in a total is the mistake that matters most on an expense claim. A short check against the photo catches it:
- Does the total match the paper? Compare it digit by digit with the total on the image.
- Do the items add up? Line item amounts should add up to the subtotal. If they don’t, an item is probably missing or misread.
- Is the decimal point there? A faint or missing dot can turn 12.50 into 1250.
- Is the tip right? On restaurant card slips the tip and final total are often handwritten, and handwriting is harder to read than print. Type them in if they look wrong.
- Is it the purchase date? Some receipts print a second date, such as a return-by date. Make sure the date field holds the day you paid.
Words the engine was unsure about are underlined, and an overall confidence level (high, fair or low) is shown. Treat a low rating as a reason to compare every number, not just the total.
CSV or JSON for your records
CSV opens in any spreadsheet app, so it’s the easiest way to get receipt data into an expense template or a budget sheet. Excel (.xlsx) is there too if your template is a workbook. JSON suits people who keep their own scripts or tools; the image to JSON page shows what’s inside the file.
Once you’ve added several receipts, the Whole document view collects them in the order you choose and exports them as one file or as a ZIP of separate files. For a walkthrough from start to finish, see how to extract text from a receipt.