How to take great pictures of receipts ? ​

The quality of a receipt directly impacts the quality of the analysis. Here is a guideline to help you send great receipts to have good results.

General conditions ​

• 🏙 Background should be contrasted (ideally dark), without pattern
• ☀️ Sufficient luminosity and contrast (avoid black and white, filtered and binarized image)
• 👓 No blur
• 📷 Enough image resolution (we must be able to zoom and sufficiently read characters on the receipt).
• 🖍 Avoid editing image (no pre-cropping, no metadata destruction like exif loss)

Position of receipt on the picture ​

• The picture should be taken vertically with the normal reading orientation of the receipt (top of the receipt = top of the picture).
• The receipt should represent a rectangle in the picture as much as possible. Avoid taking pictures in perspective. So be in front of the receipt as much as possible when taking the picture.
• The receipt should be flat (rectangle!), no folds.
• The receipt should present the integrality of the necessary information: avoid partial pictures.

We cannot analyze what is not on the picture.

Requirements on the receipt's quality ​

• The receipt should be readable by human, without faded characters.
• The receipt should not be wrinkled or damaged in any other way that affects the quality of the text.
• The receipt should not have any added writings: no underlinings, circles, etc.
• The receipt should not be folded or hidden in any part.
• The receipt image should be as original as possible

Recommendations ​

We use the whole image to extract data, even its metadata: we can extract GPS information and more from exif metadata, so be sure to preserve those data when sending images to our system to get the maximum performance.

Picture examples ​

✅ Here is a good picture example:

🚫 Here are some bad picture examples:

• Wrong orientation
• Extra writings
• Cut receipt (not all information can be found)

• Background not unified
• Receipt is not rectangular: wrinkled, not flat