How do you track receipts for reimbursement? Turn Camera Roll snaps and forwarded PDFs into one row per slip, with the fields finance asks for. Soft product land: a CSV or sheet they can open.
Month-end. A contractor texts back “need receipts for the SF trip.” You have coffee photos, Uber emails, and a hardware store PDF that may or may not belong. The pile is not a report. Finance rejects a card-statement line with no merchant slip, a total with tax folded in, a photo with no source link, and the same receipt twice (email plus Camera Roll).
A worked reimbursement ledger
Copy this shape. Amounts are measured slips from a local Q2 2026 research corpus (synthetic receipts), not invented vendors. Project labels are how you tag the row, not a story about a person.
| date | vendor | category | total | tax | paid by | project / trip | source link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-04-18 | Blue Bottle Coffee | Meals | 18.47 | 1.52 | Personal card | SF trip | 04-bluebottle.png |
| 2026-04-22 | Uber Technologies | Rideshare | 24.83 | 2.15 | Personal card | SF trip | 05-uber.png |
| 2026-05-09 | Lyft Inc | Rideshare | 19.42 | 1.68 | Personal card | SF trip | 09-lyft.png |
| 2026-06-11 | Ace Hardware | Hardware | 89.43 | 7.36 | Personal card | Shop job | 16-ace.png |
| 2026-06-15 | Nopa Restaurant | Meals | 124.55 | 10.25 | Personal card | SF trip | 17-nopa.png |
| 2026-06-22 | Best Buy | Hardware | 214.99 | 17.70 | Personal card | Office kit | 19-bestbuy.png |
One row equals one receipt. Do not paste a card-statement total as if it were the merchant slip. If the email PDF and the phone photo are the same purchase, keep one row and link both only if you must, but do not double the total.
What finance sends back
Missing tax when the slip shows tax. No source image. A statement line that names the card, not the merchant. Two rows for one coffee because you forwarded the PDF and also snapped the paper. A Camera Roll album named SF is still a pile. The report is the filtered rows.
A local Q2 2026 run on n=20 synthetic receipts (Tesseract 5.5.0, dumb OCR / Drive-like extract) is why columns beat a text dump. Vendor hit 95% (19/20). Date and total hit 100%. Tax hit 60% (12/20). All four fields correct on only 55% (11/20). Ground-truth Q2 sum $2,034.43 matched the OCR-parsed sum. Treating OCR like a searchable folder, every receipt (20/20) still had 2+ currency-like amounts, avg 6.05 matches per receipt. Raw OCR text is not a reimbursement ledger. Tax as its own column is the field finance notices first when it is wrong.
What “done” looks like at month-end
Capture slips when you pay. Confirm date, vendor, total, tax. Tag who paid and which trip or job. Keep the source file linked. Filter the trip, export CSV or a sheet, send that. OCR fills digits. You still decide whether the row belongs on the report.
Slipsheet turns photos and PDFs into rows you review, then a CSV or sheet you own. Photo, PDF, or forward to receipts@slipsheet.app. Soft land only: open the ledger, filter the trip, export what finance can open.
A few straight answers
Is a Camera Roll album a reimbursement report?
No. It stores photos. Finance wants rows with vendor, total, tax, who paid, which trip, and a way to open the slip.
Can I use the card statement instead of the receipt?
Not as the only proof. A statement line is an amount. The merchant slip is the receipt. Link the slip, do not substitute the statement.
What if I have the PDF and the photo?
One row. Pick one source link as primary. Do not add the total twice.