Rename travel expense receipts as PDF

A three-day business trip leaves a dozen receipts behind: rail ticket, hotel invoice, two taxi slips, a meal receipt, parking, conference fee. They come out of six different systems and are called Beleg.pdf, receipt.pdf or Taxi_Beleg.pdf. Filery Rename reads provider, date, type and amount from the receipt and turns them into filenames you can sort per trip. A shoebox of slips becomes a sortable folder.

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Before & After

Taxi_Beleg.pdf 2024-03-15_Dienstreise-Berlin_Taxi_12-50-EUR.pdf

Small-amount receipts are the hardest documents

An invoice has a letterhead, a till slip does not. On taxi, parking and point-of-sale receipts the provider name often appears only in small print in the footer, the layout is designed for till roll width, and the amount shows up three times: as a subtotal, as the tax share and as the total. Some arrive as a photograph of a thermal paper strip. Filery evaluates the whole receipt instead of querying fixed positions, and the total can usually be identified. Even so, this document type more than any other calls for a look at the preview before confirming.

Why the trip appears in the name although it is not on the receipt

No taxi receipt states that it belongs to a business trip to Berlin — only the person who travelled knows that. This field therefore does not come from recognition but as a fixed value from the naming pattern you store for that trip's folder. Date, expense type and amount are read from the document, the trip assignment you set once. Exactly that mixture makes 2024-03-15_Dienstreise-Berlin_Taxi_12-50-EUR.pdf possible: one folder per trip, one fixed field inside it, and everything else arises during the pass. For the next trip you create a new folder and change only that one field.

The amount in the filename and how it is written

12-50-EUR instead of 12.50 euros has a practical reason: commas and currency symbols are among the characters that cause trouble in filenames across operating systems and cloud storage. Filery replaces them by a fixed rule, so all receipts of one trip carry the same notation. The gross amount belongs in the name, because it is the amount that gets reimbursed. The VAT contained in it is on the receipt and is captured in the expense report, not in the filename. Anyone checking the total of a trip sees it while scrolling the folder, without opening a file.

What the receipt must deliver for VAT deduction

Up to 250 euros a small-amount invoice suffices, showing issuer, date, service, gross amount and tax rate. Above that, the full mandatory details are required, including the name of the recipient of the service — which is why hotel invoices must be made out to the company, not to the travelling person. Meal receipts additionally need the occasion and the participants, and those are almost always written by hand on the back. Text recognition does not read handwriting reliably, so those details belong in the expense report rather than the filename. The filename replaces no receipt check; it only makes the receipt findable.

Several slips on one sheet

The classic special case of expense reporting: five small slips glued onto one A4 sheet and scanned together. Filery treats one file as one document and would take provider and amount from the topmost slip, while the other four vanish from the suggestion. For an auditable expense report, one receipt per file is the better choice anyway. A related case is the rail operator's combined invoice covering several journeys — that is one receipt and stays one file, but should carry the period rather than a single date in its name.

How the receipt data is processed

Filery reads the PDF on your device, for photographed receipts through the text recognition you can switch on, and transmits the content encrypted for AI analysis. The recognised metadata comes back — provider, date, type, amount — the renaming happens on the device again, and the receipts themselves are not stored permanently. To get started, the free Starter plan with 50 documents a month is enough, which corresponds to roughly three or four business trips. Anyone wanting to run the analysis through their own keys uses the Custom plan at 5 euros a month.

FAQ

If amount and currency are present as text on the receipt, they are read out. Nothing is converted — the filename carries the amount exactly as the receipt states it. Conversion at the daily rate belongs in the expense report anyway.

Yes, through the document type field in the pattern. Filery recognises the type from the receipt; for slips without a clear label it is worth storing the common expense types in the configuration so the spelling stays identical across all trips.

Filery works with PDF files. Convert a photo to PDF first, which most phone cameras and scanner apps offer directly. Watch out for a straight shot and even lighting, otherwise text recognition suffers. A flat surface helps as well. Nothing is renamed without confirmation.

Not directly, but it makes digitising them in good time more worthwhile. If the receipt is scanned on the day of travel and named straight away, the fading original no longer matters for finding it. Keep the original for as long as retention rules require.

Related topics

Batch rename PDF invoices
Organize and rename contract PDFs
Rename documents after scanning

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