Here's the situation most people are in: a pile of receipts — from gas stations, restaurants, Amazon deliveries, client dinners — that need to end up in a spreadsheet. And the obvious way to do it is to sit down and type them in.
That works. It's just painfully slow.
A busy month of business expenses might mean 30 to 50 receipts. At 3-4 minutes each to type accurately, that's 2 hours of work that produces zero value. Worse, it's the kind of low-focus task where mistakes sneak in. Transposing a single digit on a $147.50 dinner receipt won't surface until your monthly total is mysteriously off by $40 and you can't find why.
There's a faster method.
What actually happens when you scan a receipt with AI
When you upload a photo of a receipt, the AI isn't just doing simple OCR (reading text). It's understanding the structure of the document: which numbers are prices, which line is the subtotal versus the tax, what the vendor name is versus the address, whether there's a tip.
The output isn't a blob of extracted text. It's a proper table:
- Vendor name and location
- Date of purchase
- Every line item, with quantity and unit price
- Subtotal, tax rate, tax amount
- Tip (if there is one)
- Total
That's what ends up in your spreadsheet. Not a wall of text you still need to parse — actual structured columns.
The 20-second process
This is what it looks like with Receipt Converter:
Take a photo. Phone camera, whatever's handy. You don't need perfect lighting or a flat surface. The AI handles angles, shadows, and mild blur. The only thing that consistently causes problems is when the receipt itself is physically damaged — heavily torn, water-soaked, or so faded you can barely read it yourself.
Upload the file. Drop it onto the site. Works with JPG, PNG, HEIC (iPhone photos), TIFF, and PDF. No app to install, no account needed for your first few.
Review the extracted data. You'll see every field populated in a few seconds. Glance at the total — does it match the receipt? For the vast majority of receipts, nothing needs editing. If something is off (usually happens with unusual formatting), you can fix it inline before exporting.
Download the Excel file. One click. You get a clean .xlsx with labeled columns, immediately usable in Excel, Google Sheets, or Numbers.
Drop any receipt photo below. Results in a few seconds, free.
What the file looks like
The exported spreadsheet has separate columns for each field. Line items each get their own row. Tax and totals are clearly labeled at the bottom.
If you're adding receipt data to a master expense tracker, you paste the rows in directly — no reformatting. The columns are standard enough to match most expense spreadsheet templates.
Upload email receipts as PDF files. Text-based PDFs extract with near-perfect accuracy because the AI reads actual characters rather than interpreting pixels. If you get receipts from Amazon, Uber, DoorDash, or any subscription service by email, save them as PDF and upload those.
The formats beyond Excel
Excel is the most flexible option but it's not the only one. Depending on what you're doing with the data:
CSV is the right choice if you're importing into accounting software. QuickBooks, Wave, FreshBooks, Xero — every accounting tool in existence accepts CSV. Export as CSV, import it, done.
PDF is what you want for submitting expense reports. If a client or employer needs a formatted document, a PDF expense report looks professional without any formatting work on your part.
JSON is for developers or teams that are building automated expense workflows. If you're piping receipt data into another system, JSON is easier to parse than a spreadsheet.
Receipt Converter exports to all four formats from the same extracted data. Pick whichever fits your workflow.
A few habits that make this even faster
Process receipts the same day. Thermal paper (the kind that comes from most cash registers and most ATMs) starts fading immediately. Some receipts are illegible within 6 months. If you're photographing them to extract data later, photograph them now.
Do it from your phone. The tool works in any mobile browser. Take the photo, upload it right there, download the file. You're done before you've even left the parking lot.
Batch at month end if you prefer. If you're on a Pro plan, you can upload up to 25 receipts at once and export them all to a single Excel file. Some people prefer to do this in one session at the end of each month rather than one receipt at a time.
Once you have the data in Excel, the next question is how to organize it so it's actually useful at tax time. That's a different problem — covered in detail in how to organize receipts for taxes without the year-end scramble.
Try it now on your most recent receipt. Upload free at Receipt Converter. No account, no friction.