Expenses and receipts — pile of pictures to clean expense report

TL;DR. Turn a folder of receipt photos and PDFs into a categorised Excel expense report ready for review and reimbursement. Roughly four hours per week saved for a finance-ops associate handling 50+ receipts per period. The OCR accuracy gap from Data extraction & OCR bites here — keep a Review tab for low-confidence rows.

Job to be done#

Turn a folder of receipt photos and PDFs into a categorised Excel expense report ready for review and reimbursement.

Who runs it#

EA, finance-ops associate, or department head doing their own expenses.

Inputs (inbox/)#

• Photos, scans, and PDFs of receipts in /inbox/receipts-[period]/
• Category list (Excel) and chart-of-accounts mapping
• Currency assumptions: default base plus overrides from receipts in foreign currency

Outputs (output/)#

• expense-report-[period].xlsx — one row per receipt with date, vendor, amount, currency, FX rate, category, GL code, source filename
• A low-confidence/ subfolder for receipts Cowork flagged as ambiguous
• A summary tab: totals by category, totals by GL code

Prompt seed#

Read every image and PDF in /inbox/receipts-[period].
Extract: date, vendor, amount, currency, payment method.
Apply category from /inbox/categories.xlsx using vendor patterns.
Convert non-base currency to GBP using the FX rates in /inbox/fx-[month].csv.
Output to /output/expense-report-[period].xlsx.
Flag rows with confidence below 90% and put them in a "Review" tab.

Quality bar#

• Amounts are read as-is, not rounded.
• Currency is always explicit; never inferred from the amount alone.
• Vendor is matched against the category list with a fuzzy-match policy you control.
• Source filename in every row for audit traceability.
• Common trip-up: line items on hotel folios. Calibrate Cowork to total the folio, not to itemise unless asked.

Time saved (typical)#

About 4 hours per week for a finance-ops associate handling 50+ receipts per period.

Upgrade path#

• Add a connector to your expense system (Expensify, SAP Concur, Pleo) so the Excel becomes a posted submission, not a manual upload.
• Convert the prompt to an expense-report skill once two clean cycles run.

Tinkso's take#

This is the workflow where OCR accuracy actually matters and the 65% / 95% gap bites. We always ship a Review tab with low-confidence rows for the first 90 days, then taper based on the team's actual rework rate. Premature trust on OCR is the most expensive mistake in this workflow — measure before you tighten.

Try this#

Take 20 receipts. Run the prompt. Time how long the manual review of the Review tab takes. That number is your real per-period time, not the marketing number from the OCR vendor.