Scan Receipts from Your iPhone Camera Roll with Apple Shortcuts

You took the photo. The receipt is there — sitting in your iPhone camera roll right next to your vacation pictures and screenshots of memes. But getting it into a spreadsheet, an expense report, or your tax records still requires opening a separate app, uploading manually, or forwarding an email.

Apple Shortcuts changes that. A single free Shortcut turns your iPhone into a receipt scanner that sends photos directly to your expense spreadsheet — no extra app download, no desktop required. This guide walks through exactly how to set it up.

Hundreds of Receipt Photos, No Way to Process Them

The iPhone camera is the most-used receipt scanner in the world. Freelancers snap paper receipts at restaurants. Contractors photograph invoices. Road warriors shoot parking stubs and fuel receipts before they lose them. The photos pile up in the camera roll — organized by date, unsearchable by merchant or amount.

The gap isn't capturing receipts. It's the step between photograph in camera roll and expense record in a spreadsheet. Most solutions require either a native app with its own storage ecosystem (Expensify, Dext, SparkReceipt) or manually uploading photos through a desktop browser. Neither works well for people who live on their iPhone.

Apple Shortcuts fills this gap because it already lives on your iPhone, works inside the Photos app, and can send data to any web API — including ExpenseBot.

Why Apple Shortcuts Is the Right Tool

Apple Shortcuts is a free automation app that ships pre-installed on every iPhone and iPad. It lets you chain together actions — "select photos, encode them, send to a URL" — and run the whole sequence with a single tap. Once configured, a Shortcut can appear in:

• The Shortcuts app (open and run manually)
• The iOS Share Sheet (tap Share inside Photos, select the Shortcut)
• The iPhone home screen (one-tap icon)
• Siri ("Hey Siri, Scan Receipts")

For receipt scanning specifically, the Share Sheet integration is the most useful: you select your receipt photos in the Photos app, tap Share, and tap the Shortcut. Done. You never leave your camera roll.

What You Need Before You Start

• An iPhone running iOS 13 or later. The Shortcuts app is pre-installed. No download needed.
• An ExpenseBot account (free 60-day trial). Sign up at expensebot.ai. Your receipts will be processed into a Google Sheet linked to your account.
• Your personal Shortcut Upload URL. This is a one-time copy-paste from your Settings page. It tells the Shortcut where to send your photos.

Setup takes about five minutes total. Once done, every future scan takes under thirty seconds.

Step 1: Get Your Personal Shortcut URL

1. Log into expensebot.ai/process-info on any device.
2. Open Settings → General.
3. Scroll to the iPhone Shortcut section.
4. Tap Copy URL. This copies your personal upload URL to the clipboard. Keep it private — it's tied to your account.

Your URL looks like: https://expensebot.ai/api/shortcut/upload?token=abc123...

Step 2: Install the ExpenseBot Shortcut

Tap the green button below on your iPhone or Mac. The shared Shortcut opens in the Shortcuts app and prompts you for your personal upload URL during install — paste the URL you copied in Step 1 when asked. That's it.

Why the install asks for a URL: your upload URL contains a private token that's unique to your ExpenseBot account. The Shortcut is shared publicly, so your token is never baked in — every user pastes their own URL at install time, wiring the Shortcut to their own spreadsheet. If you ever rotate your token (Settings → General → Regenerate URL), just edit the Shortcut's "URL" action with the new value.

Prefer to build it from scratch? The six-action recipe below takes about thirty seconds and produces the identical Shortcut — useful if you want to understand exactly what each step does or customize the flow.

Or Build It Yourself (6 Actions)

If you prefer to build the Shortcut manually — or want to understand exactly what it does — here are the six actions:

1. Select Photos — Enable "Select Multiple." This lets you choose as many receipt photos as you want.
2. Repeat with Each in [Photos] — Opens a loop that processes one photo at a time.
3. Encode [Repeat Item] with Base64 — Converts the photo into text that can be sent in a web request.
4. Get Contents of URL
   • URL: paste your Upload URL from Settings → General
   • Method: POST
   • Headers: Content-Type = application/json
   • JSON Body: key photo = [Base64 Encoded Text], key filename = "receipt.jpg"
5. End Repeat
6. Show Notification — "Receipts sent to ExpenseBot! Results appear in your spreadsheet in ~2 minutes."

Name the Shortcut "Scan Receipts" and save. The entire build takes about five minutes in the Shortcuts app.

To enable Share Sheet access: tap the Shortcut's three-dot menu → Details → toggle on Show in Share Sheet. Set "Receive" to Images.

The Zero-Friction Flow: Use It from the Share Sheet

Once "Show in Share Sheet" is enabled, you never need to open the Shortcuts app again. Here is the daily workflow:

1. Open the Photos app on your iPhone.
2. Tap Select in the top-right corner.
3. Tap every receipt photo you want to scan.
4. Tap the Share button (box with arrow).
5. Scroll down past the app icons to the Shortcuts section.
6. Tap Scan Receipts.
7. Wait for the notification: "Receipts sent to ExpenseBot!"

The photos never leave your camera roll — they are sent to ExpenseBot and processed, but the originals stay in Photos. You can also add the Shortcut to your home screen for a single-tap launch without going through Photos at all.

What Happens After You Run It

Each photo you send goes through ExpenseBot's AI pipeline:

1. Image receipt. Your photo is received by ExpenseBot's servers over an encrypted HTTPS connection.
2. AI extraction. ExpenseBot reads the receipt image and extracts: merchant name, purchase date, subtotal, tax, tip, and total.
3. Category assignment. The expense is automatically categorized to an IRS Schedule C line item (US) or CRA T2125 (Canada), or your custom categories.
4. Spreadsheet update. A new row is added to your Google Sheet with all the extracted data and a link back to the original photo in your Google Drive.

You will typically see results in your spreadsheet within one to three minutes of running the Shortcut. For batches of ten or more photos, allow five minutes.

Tips for Better Receipt Scans

• Flat and well-lit. Lay paper receipts flat and photograph them under bright, even light. Crumpled or backlit receipts reduce extraction accuracy.
• Full receipt in frame. Include the entire receipt — top line (store name) through bottom line (total and tax). Cropping out either end forces the AI to guess.
• One receipt per photo. If you have multiple receipts, photograph them separately. The AI processes one receipt per image.
• Scan the same day. The AI uses the photo's creation date as the expense date. Photos scanned days later will show today's date unless you edit it in the spreadsheet.
• Add to home screen for one-tap access. In the Shortcuts app, long-press your Shortcut → Add to Home Screen. Now "Scan Receipts" is on your home screen like any other app.