Creating expenses from existing documents

Learn how to create expense claims, company expenses, bills/invoices and cash reports from scanned documents and email attachments

Updated over a week ago

You can use Expend to extract document data from receipts and invoices. Simply upload these documents and let Expend do most of the work for you! As soon as a document is processed, you’ll be able to create an expense with a minimum of fuss.

Before you start

  • You can upload the following types of documents:
    - PDF document
    - JPEG image
    - PNG image

  • The size of the files should not exceed 5MB.

  • You'll be able to see and create expenses from the scanned documents that you have uploaded or emailed, but all users with the Admin role will be able to see everyone's submitted documents.

Processing documents

To create expenses and invoices from scanned documents and email attachments, do the following:

  1. In the menu on the left, click My Expenses.

  2. In the Document Scanner box at the top of the page, click Upload documents and select the files to upload. You can also drag and drop files to this area.

  3. When processing has finished, the item appears under Expenses showing “Ready”. Click the item to create an expense claim, invoice or cash report.

Note: You can also email Expend documents to be processed – see this guide.

When you click the item created from a scanned document, the page that opens is similar to the standard page for expenses. The form on the left side of the page is filled in with the details that could be obtained through text recognition, and the scanned document is shown on the right side of the page for easy reference.

Viewing all your scanned documents

To view all of your scanned documents, separately from other expenses, click Reporting, click Reports, and then click Your scanned documents or Company Scanned Documents (Admin users only).

Each document that has been uploaded or emailed has an entry here. While we are busy extracting details from the file, it shows “Processing”. When it has finished, it shows “Ready” and a Create Expense button becomes available. You can click this to open that specific item.

You can use the filters and buttons at the top of the page to help you find specific documents:

  • All: All documents that have been uploaded

  • Ready: Documents ready to be turned into a claim or invoice

  • Processing: Documents still being processed

  • Deleted: Items that were deleted (these documents cannot be viewed)

  • Completed: Items from which a claim or invoice was created

  • Using the box on the right, you can choose a date range to show documents uploaded during that period

Your data and privacy

We integrate with Itemize to extract the data from scanned documents that are uploaded. Please review the Itemize Privacy Policy to find out more about how information is used and stored, security, and other related topics.

Did this answer your question?