Turn a shoebox of receipts into one PDF you can actually file

Scan in batches, not one at a time

The obvious approach is to photograph each receipt as it arrives. That works, and it is what makes a shoebox in the first place. The faster method is to batch: gather a week or a month of receipts, then capture them in one sitting.

For batching, three things matter more than they do when scanning a single important page.

Keep each receipt in its own proportions

A thermal receipt from a café is long and narrow. A till roll from a hardware store is close to square. An invoice on letter paper is neither. This scanner keeps every page at its own size by default, so a narrow receipt stays narrow instead of being stretched onto a Letter sheet with its text shrunk to nothing.

If you specifically need everything on uniform Letter pages, the page-size control will do that. Most people filing receipts for their own records do not need it.

Name the file so it is findable later

One PDF per month, named for the month, is the pattern that survives contact with real life. So is one per supplier when a supplier sends you a stack. Naming it in the download field takes two seconds and saves an afternoon of hunting later.

Resolution is what makes faded thermal paper readable

Faded thermal receipts are the hardest thing to capture. The print is low-contrast grey on white, and at low resolution it turns into a smudge where the numbers should be.

This is why the browser matters more here than for an invoice. A video-stream capture is about 150 DPI on a Letter page. Full camera resolution is about 474 DPI. On a faded receipt that difference decides whether the total is readable. The scanner shows a badge reporting the resolution your browser actually delivered, so you can check rather than assume.

What this tool does not do

It is worth being direct about the limits, because receipt software usually blurs them.

• It does not read the text. The result is a clean image of each receipt, not a searchable record with the vendor and total extracted. It will not calculate a category or total up a quarter.
• It does not file anything. There is no connection to your accounting software and no export to a ledger. You get a PDF. What happens next is between you and your bookkeeper.
• It does not keep your receipts safe for tax purposes. That depends entirely on the rules where you are and the records you are required to hold. We are a capture tool and we do not give advice on record-keeping requirements. Ask whoever does that for you.

What it does do is get a stack of paper into a digital file quickly, in order, at a resolution you can actually read — and it does so without handing your receipts to anyone.

Why not use a receipt-scanning app

The dedicated tools are good, and they do more: they read the text, categorise it, and push it into your ledger. They are also mostly subscriptions starting around $5 a month, several of them require an account before they show you a scan, and the established ones upload your receipts to a server to process them.

That last part is the one to think about. A receipt shows what you bought, where, when and often how you paid. If you would rather it stayed on your phone, this is a way to get the same outcome without the account and without the upload.

• Free, with no account
• No upload of your images
• No watermark on the PDF
• Nothing kept after you close the tab