A monthly routine for turning receipts into a spreadsheet

The quarterly shoebox session is painful because every decision has gone cold. You are trying to remember what a faded café receipt from ten weeks ago was for, and whether it was billable. Doing the same work monthly costs less in total and far less in irritation.

1. Capture as you go

Photograph each receipt when it reaches you and drop it into one folder. Flat surface, decent light, all four corners in frame. This is the only step that has to happen throughout the month, and it takes seconds.

2. Extract in one batch

Once a month, run the whole folder through extraction and export a single spreadsheet. Dates, taxes, totals and line items arrive already typed as numbers and dates rather than as text that needs re-formatting before it will sum.

3. Review only what is flagged

Sort by confidence and correct the handful of fields that were uncertain. Faded thermal receipts are the usual culprits, along with anything that was folded through the total. Everything above the threshold you have chosen can be trusted without opening the image.

4. Archive the originals

Keep the images alongside the spreadsheet, named so a row can be traced back to a picture. Most tax authorities accept digital copies, and your future self will want the original the first time a line is queried.

What this does not solve

Extraction reads what is printed. It cannot tell you whether a lunch was billable, which project a taxi belongs to, or how an expense should be categorised in your chart of accounts. Those decisions stay yours — but you will be making them against typed data instead of a pile of paper.