AIOS Receipts — scanning receipts into an expense log
🎯 Purpose
Turning a photograph of a receipt into a row in a spreadsheet, without typing it in. You take the photo, AIOS reads the merchant, the date, the tax and the total off it, you check the figures it was not sure about, and it files the expense. At the end of the month you download the lot as an Excel workbook, a CSV, or a file Zoho Expense imports.
It lives at its own address: caligoarts.com/receipts, and it is free to try. After the trial it is part of the paid plan.
The two plans differ in one way worth knowing:
| Free plan | Paid plan (and admins) | |
|---|---|---|
| The standalone app at caligoarts.com/receipts | Yes, for the length of the trial | Yes, always |
| The 🧾 RECEIPTS button in the AIOS dashboard | No | Yes |
So on the free plan you reach it from its own address, from your home screen, or from the link on the AIOS page — not from a button inside AIOS.
📌 Prerequisites
- An AIOS account. Any plan. On the free plan the trial starts the first time you OPEN the app — not when you registered — so finding it months after signing up costs you none of it.
- Your ordinary AIOS sign-in. It is the same account. There is no second password and no second set of notes.
- A phone, ideally. It works on a desktop with a file picker, but the point of it is the camera in your pocket.
📲 Install it to your home screen
You do not have to, and it is better if you do — it opens like an app, it keeps working when you have no signal, and the camera is one tap from the icon.
- Android: open caligoarts.com/receipts/app.html in Chrome and accept the install prompt, or use ⋮ → Add to Home screen.
- iPhone: open it in Safari, then Share → Add to Home Screen.
- Once installed, a long press on the icon offers Scan a receipt and Export the ledger — and most Android launchers will let you drag either of those out as its own icon.
🪜 Steps — scan a receipt
- Press SCAN A RECEIPT. Your camera opens. Take the photo — flat, in decent light, the whole receipt in frame.
- Wait a second or two. The photo goes into your own media store and AIOS reads it.
- Check the figures. This is the step that matters, and it is why the app shows you the photo beside the fields.
- Anything AIOS had to guess is outlined in amber and its label says · check. That is where to look first.
- If it says "Subtotal + tax + tip adds up to the total" in green, three figures it read independently agree with each other. That is the only signal here that can catch a digit read wrongly, and it is worth trusting.
- If it does not say that, at least one of those figures is wrong. AIOS will not pick a winner for you.
- What the scan actually read opens the raw text, which is how you tell a misread digit from a figure that was never on the receipt.
- Pick a category and add a note — who it was for, what it was about. The note travels into the export and into the log note.
- Press SAVE TO THE LEDGER.
If AIOS cannot read the photo at all — a bad picture, or a deployment with no text extraction — it says so and gives you the empty form over the photo it has already saved. Nothing is lost; you type the four figures in yourself.
🪜 Steps — fix something it read wrong
Every cell in the ledger is editable, in place. Tap the date, the merchant, the category, the total, the tax or the note and change it. It saves as soon as you move off the field, and changing one cell never touches the rest of the row.
The checks / unverified pill at the end of each row is worked out again every time you change a figure — so if you correct a total and it stops adding up, the row says so immediately.
Press OPEN on a row to get the full form back — the tip, the currency, the card, the line items, the client, and a delete button.
🗂️ Categories are your projects
The category list opens with the ones a small business actually files under: meals, travel, lodging, fuel, office supplies, software, equipment, utilities, professional services, advertising, repairs, shipping, insurance, training, and uncategorised.
Press CATEGORIES to change them. One per line; the order in the box is the order in the dropdown.
They are also your projects. The first time you file something under Travel, a Travel project appears in your AIOS notebook, and the log note for that receipt goes in it.
Removing a category does not re-file the expenses already under it. Renaming your list must not quietly change last quarter's books, so an expense keeps whatever it was filed as, and the dropdown shows it with (not in your list) beside it.
⏳ The trial, and what happens after it
The banner at the top of the app counts the days down. It appears only while you are on a trial — a paid account and an admin see nothing there, because a permanent strip saying "you have full access" is the kind of thing people stop reading.
When it ends, nothing you logged goes anywhere. The app stops opening and says so; your expenses, your log notes and your receipt photos are all still in your notebook. Nothing is deleted and nothing is held back.
If you think it ended wrongly, say so. An administrator can give you a fresh trial, and the length itself is a setting they can change — raising it revives a trial that has just run out, because the app works the length out live rather than stamping an end date on your account when it starts.
📓 The log note in your notebook
Every saved expense writes one note into your AIOS notebook, in the project for its category. It carries:
- the receipt photo, rendered in the note,
- a table of everything AIOS read, with anything it guessed marked,
- the line items, if the receipt had any,
- your spreadsheet note.
Everything above ## 📝 Notes & Context is rebuilt from the ledger row each time you save it — so edit the row in AIOS Receipts rather than the table in the note. Everything under that heading is yours and is never rewritten. Put the context that does not fit in a spreadsheet cell there.
📤 Steps — get the ledger out
Set the date range, the category or a search first — the filter decides what goes in the file — then choose a format and press EXPORT.
| Format | What you get | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Excel workbook (.xlsx) | Two sheets: every expense, then every line item. Real dates you can sort, currency formats, a frozen header and a filter already on. | Your own books, or handing to an accountant. |
| CSV | The same sixteen columns, flat. | Importing into anything. |
| Zoho Expense | A CSV in the column names Zoho's importer expects. | Uploading a month into Zoho Expense in one go. |
AIOS does not post to Zoho for you. It writes the file Zoho's importer takes and you upload it. A live connection needs credentials tied to your own Zoho organisation, which is a setup job rather than a button — if you want that built properly, that is what caligoarts.com/pages/AIIntegration.html is for.
🔍 How to verify
- The ledger row is there with the right total, and the totals in the header went up.
- Open your notebook: there is a project named after the category, with a note in it called Receipt — <merchant> (<date>), and the photo is in it.
- Press EXPORT and open the file. The date is a real date, the amounts are real numbers, and the note you typed is in the Notes column.
🚨 When it does not work
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| "Your free trial has ended" | The trial ran out. | Upgrade from your AIOS dashboard. Everything you logged is still in your notebook. |
| "AIOS Receipts is on the paid plan" | Trials are switched off on this deployment. | Upgrade, or ask an administrator. |
| "AIOS Receipts is switched off" | An administrator has turned the feature off for everybody. | There is nothing to buy — ask them. Your ledger is untouched. |
| "Please sign in" | The session expired. | Sign in again. Nothing in your ledger is lost. |
| "The text could not be read" over the photo | The photo is saved, the reading failed. | Type the figures over it and save. A flatter, brighter, closer photo usually reads. |
| The total is wrong but everything else is right | OCR misread a digit. | Fix the cell. The green cross-check will tell you when the figures agree again. |
| "Text extraction is not available on this deployment" | The server has no text-reading tool installed. | Use ADD BY HAND — the photo is still stored and still attached. |
| "The expense is saved. Its log note could not be written" | The ledger row is safe; the notebook copy is not. | Open the row and save it again. The row is the source of truth, so nothing is lost either way. |
| "Could not reach the server" | No connection. | The ledger on screen is the last version this device received. Anything you save now needs a connection first. |
| A row disappeared from the ledger | You deleted it. | The log note and the photo are both still there — deleting your own notes and files is your decision, not something a spreadsheet row does. Open the note in your notebook to see what it said. |
🙅 What it does not do
- It does not read every receipt perfectly. Nothing does. That is why the fields say which ones it was sure about and why every one is editable before you save.
- It does not use AI. The reading is optical character recognition and a fixed set of rules, so the same photo always gives the same answer — and if a figure is ever questioned, the answer is "because that line of the receipt said so".
- It does not do mileage, per-diems, approvals or credit-card feeds. It is a scanner and a ledger.
- It is not free forever. There is a trial, and then it is part of the paid plan — but nothing you logged during the trial is taken away.
📖 Related
[[sop-notes-and-notebook]] for how the log notes behave, [[sop-plan-and-billing]] for which plan you are on, and [[sop-mobile-and-settings]] for installing AIOS itself to your phone.