Someone photographs a lunch receipt on the way out of the restaurant, and by the time they are back at the desk the expense row exists with merchant, date, amount, tax, and category already filled in. Reimbursement stops depending on whether anyone remembers to empty their wallet at month end.
The app embedded on this page is the Contact Flow Manager, a real Taskade Genesis build you can submit to right now. It is a plain submission surface, not an expense desk, which is exactly why it is a fast starting point: click "Use this app" to clone it in about ten seconds, swap the message box for a File field and a client picker, then add the reading and extraction steps behind it.
The build is deliberately small so people actually use it. An Expenses Project holds one row per receipt. A published form has a File field, a project or client picker, and a one-line note box, and it is designed to be filled on a phone in under fifteen seconds. On submit, the Convert File to Text step reads the receipt. Thermal-paper receipts photographed on a phone are the hardest documents in this whole category, so the extraction step is told what to do when a value is unreadable: leave it blank and flag the row rather than invent a number. An Ask Agent step returns merchant, date, currency, subtotal, tax, total, payment method, and a suggested expense category. The photo attaches to the row, the submitter is recorded, and the row enters a Needs Review state until an approver clears it.
The same expense data reads differently depending on who is looking:
- Table view for the finance export with every column visible
- Board view to move claims through Submitted, Approved, and Reimbursed
- Calendar view to see spend clustered by date
- Plus List, Mind Map, Gantt, and Org Chart across the 7 project views
Automations close the loop. With Taskade automations, a submitted receipt notifies the approver in Slack, a claim over your policy limit routes to a manager, and an approved batch writes to a Google Sheet your bookkeeper already watches. Across 100+ bidirectional integrations, Gmail pulls emailed receipts in while Slack and Sheets push approvals out. The AI agents inside the app carry 34 built-in tools and persistent memory, so the agent learns that a particular coffee shop is always a client meeting and codes it that way next time.
The build succeeds or fails on capture speed, so keep the form to three fields and put the link where people already are: a pinned message in your team channel, a phone home screen shortcut, a QR code on the back of the company card. Write your policy limits into the app as fields rather than into a handbook nobody opens, because a claim that exceeds a limit can then route itself instead of waiting for someone to notice. Run your own week of receipts through it first. You will find out quickly which merchants print badly and whether your team photographs receipts flat, and both are worth knowing before finance depends on it.
Clone it, invite the team, and the receipts, the coding, and the approval rules are yours. Nothing is locked behind an export request.
Read File Uploads in Your App for what the upload control looks like to the person filling it in, and Read Scanned Paperwork and Photos for which formats are read off the page. See Finance Apps for what to do with the rows afterwards, browse live builds in the Community Gallery, or explore ready-made bases in the templates library. Pair this with Send Supplier Invoices Straight to an Approval Board for payables and Turn Paper Timesheets Into Payroll Hours for the other half of the monthly close.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do crumpled thermal receipts really read well enough?
Well enough to be useful, and the build is honest about the rest. Flat, well-lit, and filling the frame gets you the merchant, the date, and the total most of the time. When a value cannot be read the prompt tells the agent to leave it blank and flag the row rather than guess, so review effort lands only on the receipts that need it.
Can staff submit from a phone without installing anything?
Yes. The published app opens in a phone browser, the File field opens the camera or the camera roll, and HEIC photos from an iPhone are read without conversion. There is nothing to install and no account needed unless you turn sign-in on.
How do I stop the same receipt being claimed twice?
Add a duplicate check to the prompt on merchant, date, and total. Because the check runs on parsed values rather than the file name, a re-photographed receipt is still caught. Flagged rows sit in a review lane instead of being rejected outright.
Can it handle receipts in another currency?
Ask for currency as one of the named fields and it comes back with the amount. Add a second column for your reporting currency and let the agent note the currency printed on the receipt, then apply your own rate rules in a later step rather than trusting a made-up conversion.
What does the reading step cost?
Reading words off a photo uses AI credits, like any AI step in an automation. A receipt emailed as a typed PDF is read straight through and does not use them. See AI Credits and Models.
Who can see which claims?
Turn on app sign-in through App Users and each person sees only their own submissions while finance sees everything. On Business plans and above you can put the whole thing on your own domain.
Does the photo stay attached after the values are pulled?
Always. The file is stored with the submission, attaches to the expense row, and lands in your workspace Media tab. When an auditor asks for the source it is one click from the row rather than a search through someone else's email.
How does this compare to just emailing receipts to a shared inbox?
An inbox gives you a pile with no fields, so somebody still reads every message and types the numbers. Here the same photograph produces a coded row with the merchant, the date, and the total, and the image stays attached, so the reading only happens once.
