The Receipt Pile, as a Spreadsheet

In plain terms: The receipt pile, as a spreadsheet. One photo of six receipts. A table back.

You will do them all in January.

You will not do them all in January. You will do them badly in April, and you will miss deductions because a faded receipt was not worth the argument.

It is twenty minutes, spread out.

The move: lay them flat, six to a photo.

The exact words to use

Copy this, paste it into ChatGPT, and add your own material underneath it.

Here are photos of receipts. Pull out date, vendor, total and category for each into a table. If a number is not clearly readable, write [check] instead of guessing. Do not add any receipt I did not send.

[check] is the whole trick. It turns a guess you would never catch into one cell you can go look at.

What comes back

A table you can hand to your bookkeeper.

Four columns, one row per receipt, and a short list of the ones it could not read. Paste it straight into a spreadsheet.

The one thing to watch

Three uploads a day. So batch: six receipts flat in one frame beats six separate photos, and it is the difference between doing this in two days or twelve.

Nobody has ever enjoyed this part.

You still will not. It will just be over.

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This is part of 5 Minutes With ChatGPT, a short series of things a busy owner can actually do today. Every one of them works on the free version, uses something you already have, and takes about five minutes.

If you would rather the work just happened without you doing it at all, that is what the systems are for.