Receipts and petty cash into one spreadsheet, without typing any of it.
The envelope of receipts at month end. Taxi slips, a hardware store till roll, a restaurant bill with the tip written by hand, a petty cash voucher with three signatures. Someone types every one into the expense sheet. They do not have to.
The short answer
Photograph the receipts, or scan the envelope, and upload the lot into one table: date, merchant, description, VAT, total, paid by, cost centre if you use one. Every receipt becomes a row. The ones Saff could not read cleanly, a faded thermal print, a handwritten tip, a crumpled voucher, are flagged with the photo beside them, and those are the only ones anyone types.
The export is the expense sheet, or the petty cash reconciliation, or both from the same table, since the columns are yours. Fifteen documents a month are free and a receipt is one document, so a small office's petty cash may never cost anything at all.
Why receipts are the last thing still typed by hand
Because they are the worst documents there are. Thermal paper fades in a glovebox. A till roll is a narrow column with the total somewhere near the bottom and the VAT line printed in a smaller font, or not at all. Half of them are photographed on a phone, at an angle, on a car seat, and the other half are stapled to a petty cash voucher that has more handwriting than print.
A converter has nothing to work with: no text layer in a photo, no grid on a till roll, no way to know that the number next to the word TOTAL is the one that matters and the one next to CHANGE is not. So the receipts wait for the person with the patience, and the expense claim waits with them.
In the UAE there is a second reason to get them into a sheet properly. A receipt with a TRN and a VAT line is input tax you can claim; a receipt typed as a single total is not. The VAT column is the one worth extracting, and it is the one a person typing quickly skips.
| Column | Why it is collected | What goes wrong on a receipt |
|---|---|---|
| Date | Which month, which claim. | Printed in the header in a format the till chose; faded first. |
| Merchant | Who was paid, for the ledger. | A logo, or the outlet's branch name rather than the company. |
| Description | What it was for. | Line items in till abbreviations; the useful description is handwritten on the voucher. |
| VAT | Input tax, if the receipt qualifies. | Printed small, sometimes only as a rate, sometimes absent. |
| Total | The amount reimbursed. | Total, cash tendered and change all present; a tip added by hand. |
| Paid by and cost centre | Whose claim, whose budget. | Only on the voucher, in handwriting. |
How Saff turns the envelope into a sheet
Create the table with the columns above. Photograph the receipts, one per photo or a voucher with its receipt stapled to it in one frame, and upload the batch. Saff reads each image, finds the total that is the total, the VAT where there is one, the date in whatever format the till used, and the merchant from the header, and puts them in your columns. A voucher's handwritten description and paid-by name are read where they are legible.
Flagged rows come first in the review: the faded ones, the handwritten ones, the ones where the total was ambiguous. Each has its photo beside it. Confirm or correct, mark reviewed, export. The workbook is the claim, with the review notes on a second sheet so the approver can see which values were checked by a person.
What Saff will not do with receipts
It will not decide whether an expense is allowable or which cost centre it belongs to unless that is written on the voucher. It reads the document into your columns; the policy is yours.
It will not read a receipt that has faded to blank. Thermal paper left in the sun for a month may have nothing left to read, and the honest result is an empty flagged row with the photo attached, so the claimant can be asked for a card statement instead.
Can I convert a photo of a receipt to Excel?
Yes. Photograph it with a phone, upload the JPG, and the date, merchant, VAT and total go into your columns. Anything unclear is flagged with the photo beside it.
Can I upload a whole month of receipts at once?
Yes. Upload the batch; every photo becomes one row in the same table. Fifty receipts is a routine batch.
Does it read petty cash vouchers with handwriting?
It reads the printed parts and the handwriting it can read clearly, and flags the rest. A handwritten amount that could be read two ways comes back flagged rather than guessed.
What does it cost for a small office?
Fifteen documents a month are free with no card, and a receipt is one document. Beyond that it is AED 0.50 per document, or the equivalent in your currency, so a hundred receipts is about AED 50.
Empty the envelope
Photograph this month's receipts and upload them. Fifteen documents a month are free.