Turn receipts into structured data for expense workflows
Upload or send a receipt — printed, thermal, or photographed — and get back structured fields like merchant, date, amount, tax, and line items for your expense and reimbursement process.
Fields DocumentsAI is built to pull from receipts
- Merchant name
- Receipt date
- Total amount
- Tax amount
- Payment method
- Category
- Line items
- Currency
Receipts are the messiest documents finance teams handle
Unlike an invoice, a receipt rarely comes as a clean digital file. Employees submit photographed paper receipts, faded thermal printouts, and screenshots of app-based payment confirmations — each with a different layout and print quality. Manually keying every submitted receipt into an expense system doesn't scale once a team is processing more than a handful a week.
Receipt extraction is built around that reality: it reads merchant name, date, total, tax, and payment method regardless of whether the source is a clean PDF or a photo taken on a phone in poor lighting.
That matters most for teams processing receipts at volume — a field sales team submitting claims from the road, or a services business tracking billable project expenses — where the format of any individual receipt is unpredictable and can't be standardized ahead of time.
Built for messy receipts
Crumpled paper receipts, thermal printouts, and phone photos are the norm for expense capture — extraction is built for that, not clean scans only.
API-ready output
Structured JSON is designed to feed an expense system or reimbursement workflow directly, without a manual export step.
Line-item detail
Reads individual line items on a receipt, not just the total — useful when expense policy needs category-level detail.
Reviewable before reimbursement
Extracted fields are meant to support your approval process, with amounts checked before reimbursement is issued.
For finance teams processing employee expenses
A finance or ops team handling reimbursements for a field sales team, a services business tracking project expenses, or an internal expense desk processing claims from every department all face the same volume problem: dozens or hundreds of receipts a month, each needing its merchant, date, and amount checked and keyed into an expense system before reimbursement can be approved.
A receipt OCR API is built to sit at that intake point — called from an expense app, an internal claims tool, or an email-forwarding workflow — so structured fields are already available by the time an approver looks at the claim, instead of a person transcribing every receipt first.
From a photo in a chat thread to a reimbursement record
The goal is to remove the retyping step between an employee submitting a receipt and finance recording it — not to remove your team's approval process. Structured output is designed to be checked against expense policy before reimbursement, the same way any submitted expense would be.
See the full extraction pipeline, including the field-level and full-document approaches used across all document types, on the DocumentsAI homepage.
Structured output is available as JSON for a direct API integration, or as CSV and a reviewable table when a person is checking claims before they're approved. Either way, amounts and tax figures pulled from a receipt should be verified against the original image before reimbursement is finalized — extraction speeds up the intake step, it doesn't replace the approval step.