How to Turn Receipts Into a PDF Expense Report in One Click

If you've ever submitted an expense report, you know the drill. Gather the receipts. Open Word or Google Docs. Create a table. Type in each line. Format it so it doesn't look embarrassing. Export to PDF. Attach. Send.

That process takes 30-60 minutes for a month of expenses. It's one of those tasks that feels like it should be simple but somehow isn't.

The good news: if you're digitizing your receipts at all, you already have everything you need to generate a proper PDF expense report in about 60 seconds.

What a PDF expense report actually needs

Before worrying about how to generate one, it's worth knowing what the person receiving it actually wants to see.

Whether it's a client, an employer, or your own accountant, a good expense report has:

• Your name and the date range covered
• Vendor name for each expense
• Date of each purchase
• Amount including tax
• Category or description of what it was for
• Total at the bottom

That's it. A nicely formatted table with those columns, a clear header, and a total row is all you need. No one needs a multi-page document with elaborate formatting.

The receipt-to-PDF workflow

Here's the fastest path from receipts to a submittable PDF:

Step 1: Upload your receipt photos. Go to Receipt Converter and drop in your receipt images. The AI extracts vendor, date, line items, tax, and total automatically. Works with JPG, PNG, HEIC, PDF — whatever you have.

Step 2: Review the extracted data. Glance at the vendor name, date, and total. For expense reports, the total is usually the most important field. Most extractions are accurate on the first try.

Step 3: Export as PDF. Click Export and choose PDF. You get a clean, formatted expense report document — proper table, labeled columns, totals row — ready to attach to an email.

When to use PDF vs. other formats

PDF is the right choice when you need to submit something that won't be edited further. It's a final document.

Use PDF when:

• Submitting expenses to a client for reimbursement
• Sending a monthly expense summary to your accountant
• Creating a record for your own files that you want to preserve as-is
• Your employer's expense system accepts PDF attachments

Use Excel or CSV when:

• The recipient needs to process the data themselves
• You're importing into accounting software
• You're building a master expense tracker you'll keep updating

Use JSON when:

• You're a developer feeding the data into another system

Batch processing for multiple receipts

If you have a full month of receipts to report, you don't need to convert them one at a time. Pro plan users can upload up to 25 receipts at once. Each gets extracted individually, and you can export all of them together as a single PDF expense report or as a combined Excel file.

That's the workflow for a monthly submission: upload your month's receipts, review them all, export as PDF once. Done.

What the PDF actually looks like

The exported PDF is clean and professional — header with vendor and date, line items in a table, subtotal and tax rows, total at the bottom. It's formatted the way a finance team would want to see it, not the way a designer would want to see it. That's a good thing.

It won't win any design awards, but it will be immediately legible and unambiguously correct. Which is all an expense report needs to be.

If you also need to import the data into accounting software like QuickBooks or Wave, read our guide on importing receipt data via CSV. The data extraction step is identical — just choose a different export format.

Generate your first PDF expense report now. Try Receipt Converter free →