Receipt to CSV: four ways, honestly compared
Every small business ends up with the same shoebox: paper, photos, and a spreadsheet that has to be finished before the accountant asks. Here is what the four realistic approaches actually cost you in time and risk.
1. Type them in
A receipt takes about 45 seconds to key in properly — vendor, date, amount, VAT, category. A hundred receipts is 75 minutes. The upside is that you understand every line. The downside is that you will stop doing it in month three, and the shoebox comes back.
Cost: your evening. Risk: transcription errors that surface at the worst possible moment.
2. Let a bookkeeper do it
Most small bookkeepers charge £25–£60 an hour for data entry, or a fixed £2–£5 per receipt. It is reliable, and it scales. It also means someone outside your business sees every purchase, and the bill grows every month you stay disorganised.
Cost: £200–£500 a month for a busy small business. Risk: you stop noticing what you spend.
3. Use an OCR app that uploads your receipts
This is what most people try first. You photograph a receipt, the app reads it, and the data lands in a dashboard. What the marketing does not say loudly enough is that your receipts — supplier names, prices, sometimes card fragments — are stored on someone else's server, often indefinitely, often in another jurisdiction.
For a restaurant that is mildly annoying. For a clinic or an accountant holding client records, it is a data-protection conversation you do not want to have.
Cost: £10–£40 a month per user. Risk: your financial documents live somewhere you cannot audit.
4. Run the OCR locally
Modern browsers can run an OCR engine (WebAssembly) on your own CPU. The receipt is read on your laptop. Nothing is uploaded, so there is nothing to leak and nothing to store.
The trade-off is honest: browser OCR is slower than a GPU farm, it only handles printed text, and you usually need to fix a field or two. But for a shoebox of receipts it is fast enough, and the privacy claim is checkable — open the network panel and watch nothing leave.
Cost: free for the first few each month. Risk: you will occasionally correct a number by hand.
What the numbers look like
For 100 receipts a month:
- Typing: ~75 minutes, plus the error you find in March.
- Bookkeeper: ~£300/month, no time from you.
- Uploading app: ~20 minutes, and your data is elsewhere.
- Local OCR: ~15 minutes including corrections, data never moves.
Making the corrections fast
Whichever method you pick, the same three fields cause almost all the pain: the total, the date, and which supplier it was. Sort your export by amount before you review it — a mistyped total is usually obvious as an outlier, whereas a mistyped date hides for months.
If you are using a tool that gives you vendor, date, total and currency in a table you can edit, fix the total first, then the date. The supplier name can stay messy; your accountant will normalise it anyway.
Common questions
Is a CSV good enough for my accountant?
Usually yes. Most accounting tools import CSV, and Xero, QuickBooks and FreeAgent all accept it. Ask yours which columns they want before you spend an hour reformatting.
Do I need to keep the paper receipts?
In the UK, HMRC expects records kept for six years (longer for some items). A photo is usually acceptable, but check with your accountant — and keep the photos somewhere you control.
Can OCR read a crumpled receipt?
Sometimes. Flatten it, avoid shadow, and photograph straight down. Faint thermal paper is the hardest case; expect to correct the total by hand.