OCR a year of receipts so tax time stops being a folder of mystery JPEGs
A 30-minute weekend project that turns a phone roll of receipts into a searchable, exportable archive.
Twelve months of receipts in your phone's Photos app means you can't find anything. Twelve months in an OCR'd PDF means a search bar does the work for you.
Ready to try this yourself?
Open OCR Recognition in a new tab and read the rest while you upload.
If you freelance, the worst tax-season hour is the one where you scroll through your camera roll looking for a single $42 charge from March. A 30-minute weekend can replace that hour with Ctrl-F. Here's the workflow.
The workflow
- Export every receipt photo from your phone for the year into one folder.
- Run them through Images to PDF — pick "one image per page" and sort by date.
- Open the result in Evixpdf and run OCR PDF. This takes a minute per ~50 pages.
- Save under <year>-receipts.pdf in a folder you back up.
What you get
A single PDF you can search for "Uber", "Office Depot", "$42", or a vendor name and jump straight to the receipt. Drop it into your accountant's portal once a year and you're done.
Pair this with Extract Text if you want a CSV of every line item — most receipts have totals that OCR catches cleanly enough to paste into a spreadsheet.