App Idea - Expense Receipt Scanner

At work, I use an expense reporting app called Concur that allows me to take pictures/scans with my phone and allows me to attach these to expenses. It'd be great to have something similar for church expenses. A member submits the reimbursement request with receipt, we can use the phone to load the scans into the website, and then from the website, select the appropriate docs to attach to the expense (like the direct deposit). A more intense, and less-likely approach would be to have this app allow members to submit expenses themselves, then get approvals on the website from their org president, then Bishop and direct deposit after Bishop approvals (but this sounds like getting aux. presidencies to approve expenses online might be "too hard and complicated" for some members). But it would be great to have these documents already attached to the expense and auditors could simply do the audit from the computers by looking at all the documentation right from their auditing website because we already loaded it. But as it stands right now, you'd have to scan the documents with a scanner or scanner app, output a pdf, locate the expense, and upload the pdf into the expense. It'd be really easy to have the phone scan the documents and be put into a ward "expense/receipt library" to choose and attach documents.

Other than a member uploading their own receipts, this is very similar to the process that can be done with church expenses today. It is neither difficult, nor time consuming.

I our unit, we have asked members to email their digital receipts to the organization president who forwards the email as their approval to the clerk or assistant clerk-finance to upload. The system does not "require" .pdf documents, it can take .jpg and .png files as well so most phones with at least a camera app will do just fine. For expenses I incur, I will usually opt for the "email receipt" option at the store. Then it is already digital and I can forward it to the assistant clerk-finance to process my reimbursement. He can use the "print-to-pdf" function for the email and upload. If I don't have a digital copy, I send him a pic of the receipt instead and that works just fine.

You might submit your idea for an online member-submittal process for receipts via the church web site - feedback is read and forwarded to the appropriate departments for consideration. Posts to this user-to-user help forum may never make it to anyone with any decision authority.

Office Lens does a pretty good job of capturing a document.

russellhltn wrote:Office Lens does a pretty good job of capturing a document.

As long as there are no lines in the document. I have given up on Office Lens for capturing baptismal consent forms because it cuts off at the line just above the parent's signature. Kind of pointless to upload a signed document with the signature cut off. It struggles to choose correctly between the edge of the paper and a line in the page (my experience only).

It does better with receipts as long as there are no lines before any important information.

davesudweeks wrote:It struggles to choose correctly between the edge of the paper and a line in the page (my experience only).

You might try it on a different background. Preferably something different than the paper.

I usually use a clipboard that's black.

I have found that when Office Lens does not fully enclose the document that tapping the edge line that is within the document often makes the app expand further. Also tapping on a part of document tells the app that is where I want it to set the focus point.

The Google Drive app has a built-in scanner I have used. It saves the scan in Drive where I am able to easily email it to its destination, then delete the scan. I discovered it when I was searching for a pdf scanner for my new phone. Turns out I dd not need the old scanner I was using on my old phone.

On iOS 13 (which should be out in the next month or two), Apple's "Files" app also has a document scanning feature.