Receipts & OCR

The receipt is your proof; the transaction is the record. GBooks Air ties the two together: OCR (optical character recognition) reads your receipts and drafts the bookkeeping, and every image stays attached to its transaction for whenever the CRA comes asking.

How the OCR works, and where

It runs entirely in your browser, built on the Tesseract engine running locally. Your receipt images never get uploaded to a server, which is consistent with how the whole app is built: your books stay on your device, full stop.

Capturing a receipt

1. Open Receipts and snap a photo (on mobile) or drop in an image file.
2. The OCR reads what it can off the image: vendor name, date, subtotal, tax, total.
3. Review the draft transaction it proposes, confirm or correct anything, pick the expense category, and save.

If a vendor rule already exists for the merchant, the category gets pre-filled too. A coffee-shop receipt can go from photo to fully booked expense in about ten seconds.

Getting good reads

OCR quality mostly comes down to photo quality:

• Flat and square — smooth the receipt out and shoot it straight-on, not at an angle.
• Even light, no shadows — daylight or bright indoor light works; watch out for your own shadow falling across the paper.
• Fill the frame — the receipt should take up most of the shot.
• Sooner rather than later — thermal paper fades within months. Photograph receipts the week you get them, not the week before your return is due.

Still getting bad reads? See OCR isn't reading my receipts.

Why the tax line matters more than it looks

When OCR captures the GST/HST amount separately, that number feeds directly into your input tax credits — the tax you claim back on your return. A receipt with the tax split out correctly is genuinely worth money at filing time, so it's worth the extra second to double-check that field before you save.

The CRA Receipt Vault

Every captured receipt sits with its transaction. The Receipt Vault export packages the whole lot into a single organized ZIP, images named and grouped so a reviewer, or your accountant, can find any receipt in seconds. The CRA expects supporting documents kept for six years, and a Vault export alongside your encrypted backup at year-end covers that in one download.