Task guide · receipts

Turn receipt PDFs into an expense spreadsheet

Organise merchant, date, item, tax and total fields from digital receipt PDFs while keeping the original documents on your device.

Email receipts and point-of-sale exports are often true text PDFs and can be extracted. Phone photos and scanned paper receipts are image files inside a PDF, so they require OCR before PDFtoGrid can read them. Knowing which kind you have prevents wasted cleanup.

Step-by-step workflow

1. Separate digital receipts from scanned receipts. OCR the scanned set with a trusted tool before continuing.
2. Load one receipt PDF and select only the page containing the item table.
3. Tune column spacing until item, quantity and price separate cleanly.
4. Copy merchant, receipt date and total into their own columns if they sit outside the detected table.
5. Export and add expense category, payment method and source-file columns in your spreadsheet.

One receipt per row or one item per row?

Choose the layout that matches the job. For expense reporting, one row per receipt is often enough: date, merchant, subtotal, tax and total. For price analysis or inventory, retain one row per item and repeat the merchant and receipt date for every line.

Common recognition problems

Receipts use narrow columns, abbreviated descriptions and tightly packed prices. Discounts may appear as separate negative rows, while tax can be printed below the table. Preserve those rows until the extracted total agrees with the receipt.

Build an audit trail

Keep the original filename in the spreadsheet and avoid overwriting the source PDF. A simple naming pattern such as date-merchant-total makes it much easier to trace a spreadsheet row back to evidence.

Questions