Scan receipts into a PDF
A handful of crumpled receipts, photographed and cleaned up into one PDF for the expense report.
- Nothing is uploaded
- Works offline after first visit
- Open source
- No watermark · limit is your device’s memory; phones hold less
Scan paper receipts for expenses, taxes or returns: each photo is cropped to the receipt, straightened and whitened, then saved as one PDF. It is free, needs no account and adds no watermark, and your files are not uploaded: everything runs in your browser on your device. The size limit is your device’s memory, and phones hold less; give the page a short while after one visit to save itself for offline use, and then it works offline.
Done
Open the network tab. Your files never appear in it.
Add files and run the tool to see every request this tab makes.
Your files are processed on this device and never sent to a server. Reload the page to clear everything from memory.
Expense systems and accountants want receipts as PDFs, and the originals are thin till rolls that fade, curl and get lost. Photograph them the day you get them and turn the photos into clean pages here: each receipt is cut out of the photo, pulled straight and its paper made white so the faded print stands out.
A worked example: five receipts from a two-day work trip, a hotel bill, two taxis, a train ticket and a dinner. Put each one on a dark table or a closed laptop lid, flatten it with a finger at the edge, and photograph it from above. Drop the five photos here; Grey is already chosen because thermal print can be too faint for pure black and white. Press Scan receipts and you get scan.pdf with one receipt per page, ready for Expensify, Concur, SAP or an email to your accountant.
A long till receipt comes out as a tall narrow page centred on the paper size, which prints and zooms well. If the receipt is creased, the fold may bend the lines of text slightly, since the scan straightens the four corners rather than ironing the paper.
How it works
- Photograph each receipt flat on a dark surface.
- Drop the photos; Grey is already chosen for faint thermal print.
- Press Scan receipts and attach the PDF to your expense report.
In your browser, not on a server
Your browser decodes each photo (HEIC too) in the tab. A 400-pixel copy is blurred, split into light and dark with Otsu’s threshold, and the largest light region is taken as the page if it fills its own four-cornered outline; its corners are the extremes along the two diagonals. A perspective transform (a homography solved from the four corners) maps every pixel of the flat page back into the full-resolution photo, capped at 3508 pixels on the long side (A4 at 300 dpi). The paper’s brightness is then estimated in coarse blocks and divided out, which turns shadows and yellow light white. pdf-lib (MIT) puts the pages into one PDF.
Compared with upload-based tools: Scanner apps want an account, a subscription or a watermark on free scans, and many upload every page to their cloud to process it. Here there is nothing to install, the pages are processed on your device, and the result is a plain PDF or image with no watermark.
Verify it yourself. Give the page a short while after one visit to save itself for offline use, then turn off Wi-Fi or switch to airplane mode and run the tool again. Or open your browser's developer tools (F12, or Cmd-Option-I on a Mac), pick the Network tab, and watch it while you convert. The panel above does the same count for you.
Questions
Why Grey and not Black and white?
Receipts are printed by heat on thermal paper, and the print fades to light grey within months. Pure black and white can drop faint characters; Grey keeps them while still turning the paper white.
Will it read the totals and dates for me?
No, it makes clean images of the receipts. To search or copy the text, run the PDF through OCR PDF afterwards.
Can I keep one image per receipt?
Yes. Choose Images under Save as and each receipt is saved as its own picture.
Are my receipts uploaded?
No. They are processed in this tab, and card digits, addresses and what you bought stay on your device.
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Guides
- How to scan a document with your phoneBoth iPhone and Android can scan paper into a clean PDF without a dedicated app, if you know where to look. Here is where, plus a browser option for when you would rather not.
- A free CamScanner alternative with no watermarkCamScanner's free account has storage and feature limits, with a Premium plan above it. Here is a scanning alternative with no watermark and no tier to pay for.