Receipt scanning with OCR

Photograph the receipt or invoice and the app reads the supplier, date, total, VAT and tax ID — no typing and no transcription errors.

Keying receipts in by hand is the most expensive and most error-prone part of the whole settlement process: transposed digits, VAT computed wrong, the same supplier spelled three different ways. The OCR engine in 4expenses reads the document from the photo and fills the expense report: supplier name, tax ID, date, document number, total, taxable base and VAT by rate. The employee only confirms. Anything that could not be read confidently is flagged for review, so no uncertain value slips silently into accounting.

Automatic extraction: supplier, tax ID, date, document number, total, base and VAT by rate.
Recognises Romanian fiscal receipts and invoices as PDF or image.
Low-confidence fields flagged, so human checking is targeted rather than blanket.
Batch import: upload several documents at once and get one report per document.
Invoices received by email pulled in without downloading and re-uploading.
Supplier normalisation: the same partner no longer appears in five spellings.
Duplicate detection on supplier + date + amount.
The original document stays attached as evidence of what was read.

Why extraction quality matters more than simply having OCR

An OCR engine that reads 80% of the fields correctly does not save time - it creates review work on every single document. What makes the difference is handling uncertainty explicitly: 4expenses does not just fill in the fields, it flags how confident it is about each one. High-confidence fields move on without any intervention; uncertain ones are highlighted and ask for a one-second confirmation. Human effort then goes exactly where it is needed, instead of being spread across re-reading the whole document.

VAT read by rate, not as a single amount

A receipt from a mixed retailer usually contains items at different VAT rates. If the system only extracts the total, the accountant has to open the document anyway. 4expenses reads the breakdown by rate wherever the receipt shows it and carries it through to the export, which noticeably shortens bookkeeping work and reduces errors when VAT is deducted.

Thermal receipts, skewed photos, poor lighting

Real documents do not look like the ones in a demo. Thermal receipts fade, photos are taken in a car or on a restaurant table, some documents are crumpled. The app corrects perspective, boosts contrast and crops the document out of the background before reading it. When a document is unreadable anyway, the employee gets immediate feedback to retake the photo - while the receipt is still in hand, not three weeks later.

The extracted data, and the original document too

Automatic extraction does not replace the supporting document: the original image stays attached to the expense report, with the date and time it was uploaded. During an inspection or an internal audit you can always compare the recorded amount with the document it came from, and the history shows whether a field was corrected manually after reading, by whom and when.

Legal references

Legea nr. 82/1991 — Romanian Accounting Act, art. 6 (supporting document requirement)
OMFP nr. 2634/2015 — statutory financial-accounting documents
Legea nr. 227/2015 — Romanian Fiscal Code, title VII (VAT, conditions for deduction)
OUG nr. 28/1999 — electronic fiscal cash registers (mandatory receipt content)

Frequently asked questions

What documents can the OCR engine read?

Romanian fiscal receipts, invoices in PDF or image format, receipts and transport tickets. For invoices received electronically, the data is taken straight from the file, which gives the best accuracy.

What happens if the OCR misreads an amount?

Low-confidence fields are flagged visually and require confirmation before the expense report can be submitted. Every manual correction stays in the report history, next to the originally extracted value, so the difference remains auditable.

Can I upload several receipts at once?

Yes, batch import creates a separate expense entry for each recognised document. It is useful for employees who collect receipts throughout a business trip and upload them on return.

Is receipt data processed in line with GDPR?

Documents may contain personal data, so they are treated as such: role-based access, an audit log of who accessed what, and retention policies configurable per document type.

Does the OCR work on documents in other languages too?

Yes, for the documents commonly collected on trips abroad. Accuracy is highest on Romanian documents and on structured invoices; for the rest, uncertain fields are flagged for review.

Related resources

Online expense reports →The employee photographs the receipt as they pay, the app fills in the expense report, and approval and settlement start on their own — no Excel forms emailed around at month end.Corporate cards and reconciliation →Every company-card transaction finds its own receipt: automatic reconciliation shows instantly which payment is missing a supporting document and who has to upload it.Accounting export →The approved expense batch goes to accounting with everything the accountant needs: accounts, VAT by rate, cost centres, partners and the supporting documents attached.

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