Take phone photos of paper receipts that are actually readable later

Paper receipts fade. Most of mine are unreadable inside a year. The trick isn't a fancy scanner app — it's three habits that take an extra five seconds at the till.

Shoot it before you put your wallet away

The single biggest reason a receipt photo turns out bad is that it's been folded into a back pocket for half a day before the camera comes out. Snap it at the table, on the bench, on the bonnet of the car — wherever it's flat and the till just handed it to you.

If you forget and end up with a creased one later, flatten it under a book for a few minutes before photographing. Crumpled paper throws shadows that confuse OCR.

Use a plain dark surface

White receipts on a white table give the camera nothing to lock onto. A dark wood table, a black notebook, even a charcoal jumper on your lap — anything with contrast around the edge of the paper helps the camera find the document and crop it correctly.

Get directly above, not at an angle

Phones are good at correcting mild perspective skew, but a receipt shot from a 30-degree angle ends up trapezoid-shaped, and the totals at the bottom blur. Hold the phone parallel to the paper, fill the frame, tap to focus on the printed text, and shoot.

If you're indoors with overhead lighting, watch for your own shadow falling across the receipt. A half-step to the side fixes it.

One photo per receipt, not a wall of them

It's tempting to lay six receipts out and snap one photo at the end of a trip. Don't. The thumbnail crop ends up tiny, the OCR has to guess vendor boundaries, and editing later means cropping six receipts out of one image. One receipt, one photo, every time.

What rct-keep does with the photo

Upload it from the phone (or share-sheet it directly into the upload page) and the OCR pulls vendor, total, date, GST and line items into the right fields. If anything looks off, the parsed values are editable on the receipt page — the original photo never gets re-encoded, so you've still got the source if a question comes up later.

One thing not to do

Don't crop the photo before uploading. The OCR is happier with a small border of context around the receipt edges, and zealous cropping sometimes shaves the date or the total off the top or bottom. Frame it tight in the camera, then leave it alone.

This works even better inside Receipt Keep — start a 14-day free trial.