Assemble an Expense Claim With Receipts

Fourteen receipts, photographed over six weeks in restaurants, taxis and a hotel lobby. A claim form with a line for each one. A finance portal that wants a single attachment, under its limit, with pages you can cite by number when somebody queries line nine.

The hard part is not any single conversion. It is that receipts arrive in the order you spent money and have to leave in the order the form lists them, and that the numbering has to survive whatever you do about the file size.

Images to PDF makes one page per image, in the order the files are listed. That is the whole ordering mechanism, so rename first: 01-taxi-0712.jpg, 02-hotel-0713.jpg, and so on, matching the line numbers on your claim form. Five minutes of renaming saves a drag-and-drop argument later.

Choose A4 or Letter pages with a small margin so the result prints, and keep the fit on Contain. A receipt cropped by Cover fitting is a receipt missing its total.

1. 1

   Fill the claim form

   Complete it in the editor before combining, so the finished form is one clean source rather than something you edit inside a fifteen page bundle.

2. 2

   Combine

   Put the form first and the receipts behind it in Merge PDF. Finance reads the summary before the evidence.

3. 3

   Fix what the camera did

   Use Organize PDF to rotate the two receipts you photographed sideways, delete the accidental shot of the table, and move the duplicate taxi receipt out.

4. 4

   Number every page

   Now the sequence is final, add Page Numbers. This is what lets a reviewer write see page 9 instead of the third taxi one.

Phone photographs are the weight here: fourteen of them can easily out-mass the form by a factor of fifty. Run Compress PDF in Lossless cleanup first. It rewrites the file efficiently and changes nothing you can see, and on an already efficient PDF it may save almost nothing, which is worth knowing before you assume it failed.

If that is not enough, Raster pages renders each page to a JPEG at a DPI and quality you choose. Around 150 DPI keeps an ordinary receipt readable. The trade is stated plainly by the tool and worth repeating: the pages become images, so selectable text, links and form fields are gone. Keep the pre-compression master, because that is the copy you go back to when finance asks for a clearer version of one receipt.

• Receipts in spending order rather than claim-line order, so every reviewer has to map one to the other.
• A thermal receipt photographed under a ceiling light, where the glare covers the total.
• Rasterising the whole claim to save two megabytes, which also destroys the searchable text on the form itself.
• Sending the claim as fifteen separate images because the conversion step felt optional.