Capturing receipts well

Extraction accuracy starts at the camera. A better photo means fewer flagged fields and less time spent correcting.

Before you shoot

• Lay the receipt flat. A curled thermal receipt distorts the printed totals.
• Get the whole document in frame, including the very top and the very bottom line.
• Avoid glare across the total — angle the light source, don't shoot straight under it.
• One receipt per photo, unless it's genuinely one multi-page document.

The on-device quality gate

Before a photo is even uploaded, the app checks it isn't blurry and does look like a document. This catches an obvious re-take on the spot rather than after a wait for extraction. It never decides what the document says — that happens once, server-side, so the same photo always produces the same read and can be re-run later against a better model.

Faded and thermal receipts

Thermal receipts fade over weeks, especially in a hot car or a wallet. Photograph fuel and servo receipts as soon as you can — a faded original is still your legal record, but a clear photo taken while it's still legible extracts far better than a photo of the same receipt taken a month later.

Multi-page documents

A tax invoice that spans more than one page is captured as a single multi-page document rather than as separate receipts — this keeps the line items and the total reconciling against one supplier and one document number, instead of looking like two smaller purchases.

Duplicates

Uploading the exact same image twice is recognised immediately and treated as the same capture, not a new one — it's not an error, you'll just be pointed at the existing record. A receipt that merely looks like another (same supplier, same amount, same day — two coffees, say) is only ever soft-flagged as a possible duplicate for you to check. It is never merged automatically, because two identical purchases on the same day are sometimes both real.