Scan Expense Bills with AI — Fuel, Newspaper, Courier & More

What It Does

Small expense bills are the worst part of bookkeeping. Individually trivial, collectively hours — and they pile up in a drawer until someone types a month's worth in one miserable sitting.

This screen removes the typing. Give it a photo or PDF of a bill and the AI:

• Reads the vendor, date, bill number, amount and any tax;
• Picks the right expense ledger — checking first for one you've used before for that vendor;
• Writes a clean narration;
• Drafts a Payment voucher: debit the expense, credit the Cash or Bank account you paid from.

Nothing posts until you approve it. Every draft opens in a review dialog first, so the AI proposes and you decide.

Which Bills Work

Any ordinary business expense bill. The ones people ask about most:

Formats: PNG, JPG, WEBP and PDF, up to 20 MB each. You can select several at once — a whole month's drawer in one go.

💻 Part 1 — On the Desktop

Steps 1 to 7 below cover the desktop screen, which is where you'll clear a batch of bills. If you want to scan a single bill on your phone right now, jump to the Android app section — then come back, because the review and posting rules are the same either way.

Step 1 — Open the Screen

1. Open the 🤖 Auto Accounting menu.
2. Click 🧾 Scan Bill → Payment (AI).

Or press F12 and ask the AI assistant to scan a bill — it opens the same screen.

Step 2 — Set "Paid From"

The Paid from dropdown lists your Cash and Bank ledgers, with Cash first because most small bills are cash. Whatever you pick here gets credited.

Get this right before extracting. It's the one field the AI can't read off the bill — a petrol receipt looks identical whether you paid cash or by card.

Step 3 — Choose the Bills

Click 📷 Choose / scan bill(s)… and select one or more files. They appear in the Selected bills list on the left, and clicking any image shows it in the preview panel on the right — worth a glance to confirm the photo is actually readable. (PDFs aren't previewed.)

Picked the wrong file? Select it and click Remove selected.

Batching is the real time-saver here: select fifteen bills, extract once, and review them all together.

Step 4 — The Optional Hint

The Note box lets you steer the AI when a bill is ambiguous. Leave it blank and it works it out itself.

Use it when the bill doesn't say what it was for — a hardware shop receipt that could be repairs or office expense, or a fuel bill you want booked to a specific vehicle. Type "computer repair" or "diesel for delivery van" and it books accordingly.

The hint applies to the whole batch, so if you're steering one odd bill, extract it on its own.

Step 5 — GST Input Credit (When It Applies)

Leave Claim GST input credit (ITC) unticked and the bill's gross total goes to the expense ledger — correct for a petrol slip, a newspaper bill, or any receipt that isn't a proper tax invoice.

Tick it when you hold a GST tax invoice and are entitled to the credit. The AI then splits the entry properly:

• The taxable value (before GST) is debited to the expense ledger;
• The tax is debited to input-tax ledgers under Duties & Taxes — Input CGST + Input SGST for a supplier in your own state, or a single Input IGST for an inter-state invoice;
• The grand total is credited to your Cash or Bank ledger.

It reads the supplier's state from the first two digits of their GSTIN to decide which. If the bill turns out to show no GST at all, it falls back to booking the gross total to the expense — so ticking it on a plain receipt does no harm.

Step 6 — Extract

Click ✨ Extract & make entry. The status line reads "Reading the bill(s) with AI…" while it works. A single bill takes a few seconds; a large batch takes proportionally longer, and the review dialog waits until the whole batch is done.

Step 7 — Review & Post

The review dialog shows one draft per bill. Check each one:

• Amount — against the bill. The single most important check.
• Date — the bill's own date, or today's if the bill didn't show one.
• Expense ledger — change it if you'd rather book it elsewhere.
• Narration — vendor, purpose and bill number.
• New ledgers — anything that doesn't exist yet is flagged and created on approval.

Edit anything that's wrong, then approve. Only then is the voucher posted.

The Entry It Creates

A ₹2,000 fuel bill paid in cash, without ITC:

The same bill as a ₹2,000 GST tax invoice (₹1,694.92 taxable + 18% GST), with ITC ticked, intra-state:

The sides are enforced before you ever see the draft — the Cash/Bank leg is always the credit and the expense is always the debit, whatever the AI proposes. You can still change it in the review dialog if a particular bill needs it.

Three Worked Examples

⛽ Fuel bill

Photograph the petrol pump slip. Paid from: Cash. ITC: unticked — petrol and diesel are outside GST, so there's no credit to claim. Result: Dr Fuel Expenses, Cr Cash, with the pump's name and the date in the narration. If you run several vehicles, add a hint like "diesel — Tata Ace" and it lands in the narration for later reference.

📰 Newspaper bill

The monthly bill from the newspaper vendor, usually a handwritten slip. Photograph it, paid from Cash, no ITC. It typically books to Office Expenses; if you prefer a separate Newspaper & Periodicals ledger, change it once in the review dialog — from then on it reuses that ledger for the same vendor.

📦 Courier bill

A courier receipt or the monthly account statement from your courier company. Paid from Cash or Bank depending. If the courier company issues a proper GST tax invoice and you're entitled to the credit, tick ITC and the CGST/SGST gets split out. Books to Courier Charges.

📱 Part 2 — On the Android Mobile App

The bills are in your pocket, not on your desk — so the Android app is where this feature really earns its keep. Photograph the petrol slip at the pump and it's booked before you've driven off. No drawer, no backlog, no Sunday evening data entry.

Everything the desktop screen does, the Android app does too. The difference is the camera.

The built-in document scanner

The iAccounting Android app doesn't just take a photo — it includes a proper document scanner:

• Edge detection — it finds the bill against the background by itself.
• Auto-capture — it shoots when the frame is steady and square, so you don't get motion blur.
• Crop & perspective correction — a bill photographed at an angle is straightened into a flat rectangle.
• Enhancement — contrast is lifted so faint thermal print becomes legible.

This matters more than it sounds. A flat, cropped, high-contrast image is read far more accurately than a crooked photo of a crumpled slip on a dark desk — so the scanner directly improves how often the amount comes out right first time.

If the document scanner can't start on a particular handset, the app falls back to a plain camera capture automatically. You're never blocked.

The app asks for camera permission once, at first launch. Grant it — without it the camera option can't appear later.

Scanning a bill, step by step on the phone

1. Open the app and tap the 📷 Scan tab.
2. Under "What are you scanning?" choose Expense bill → Payment. (The other options — purchase invoice and sales invoice — go to the stock screens instead.)
3. Tap 📷 Take a photo to shoot the bill with the scanner. Or use pick from gallery / files for a bill you photographed earlier.
4. The captured image appears as a preview. Check it's readable before going on.
5. Optionally type a Hint — the same idea as the desktop Note box, e.g. "diesel for delivery van".
6. Tap ✨ Extract & review.
7. The drafted voucher appears with editable fields — party, date, bill number, narration. Correct anything, then submit.

Prefer Take a photo over the gallery picker when shooting a fresh bill: on some handsets the gallery picker offers no camera tile at all.

Mobile Setup — What You Need

One thing to understand before you start, because it explains everything else: your phone is a remote control for your desktop, not a second copy of your books. The bill is read and the voucher is posted on the computer where your company file lives. Your accounting data never sits on the phone — which is exactly what you want if the phone is lost or stolen.

Setting it up:

1. Install the Android app on the phone.
2. Start iAccounting on the desktop and open the company you want to work in.
3. On the desktop, turn on remote access. This starts the connection service and displays a pairing PIN.
4. On the phone, enter that PIN to pair. On the same Wi-Fi the two connect directly over your local network; from outside — at the pump, at a client's office — they connect through the relay, so distance doesn't matter.
5. Scan. The bill is sent to the desktop, read there, and the voucher is posted into your company file.

Desktop switched off? Photograph the bills anyway with your ordinary camera app. Pick them up later from the gallery in the Scan tab, or copy them across and use Choose / scan bill(s) on the desktop. Nothing is lost — you're only deferring the extraction.

Desktop or Mobile — Which to Use When

Both do the same job and post into the same company file. Pick by where you are:

The workflow most businesses settle into uses both: staff photograph bills on the phone as they happen, and whoever keeps the books does a desktop pass for the GST tax invoices where the input-credit split needs deciding.

✍️ Part 3 — The Manual Way (No AI, No Credits)

Scanning isn't compulsory. Every expense here can be entered by hand, and sometimes that's genuinely the better choice. It's also worth knowing the manual route because it's exactly what the AI produces — understanding it makes reviewing the scanned drafts much faster.

Entering a fuel bill manually

1. Open Transactions → Payment, or just press F9.
2. Set the date from the bill.
3. Debit the expense ledger — Fuel Expenses. If it doesn't exist yet, type the name and create it under Indirect Expenses.
4. Enter the amount from the bill.
5. Credit the Cash or bank ledger you paid from.
6. Write the narration — vendor, purpose, bill number.
7. Save.

A newspaper or courier bill is identical; only the expense ledger changes (Office Expenses, Courier Charges).

A GST tax invoice manually

Same voucher, more legs — this is where the manual route gets fiddly and the scanner earns its keep:

1. Debit the expense ledger with the taxable value (before GST).
2. Debit Input CGST and Input SGST with the tax halves — or a single Input IGST for an inter-state invoice. Create these under Duties & Taxes.
3. Credit Cash or Bank with the grand total.
4. Check total debit equals total credit before saving.

You're now reading the GSTIN to decide CGST+SGST versus IGST, splitting the tax, and separating taxable value from gross — for every invoice. That's precisely the arithmetic the AI does for you.

Manual vs Scanned — Which to Use When

Most businesses use both without thinking about it: scan the drawer and the tax invoices, and type the odd ₹200 cash bill that's quicker to key than to photograph. There's no penalty for mixing them — both produce the same ordinary Payment voucher.

How It Learns Your Ledgers

Before choosing an expense head, the AI looks up what you've used before for that vendor or keyword and reuses the exact same ledger. Only when nothing matches does it propose a standard name.

The practical effect: correct it once. Re-point the newspaper bill from Office Expenses to your own Newspaper & Periodicals ledger in the review dialog, and the next month's bill goes there by itself. Your chart of accounts stays yours instead of slowly filling with near-duplicate ledgers.

What It Costs

Reading a bill uses AI credits from your prepaid wallet — extraction is the metered part. Reviewing, editing and posting cost nothing, and a re-read only happens if you extract again.

Batching is therefore both faster and tidier: one extraction run over fifteen bills, one review session.

Troubleshooting

Tips & Best Practice

1. Shoot the bill at the counter. The habit that actually clears the drawer is photographing each bill when you get it, not collecting them.
2. Flat, lit, filled frame. Put the bill on a plain surface, avoid your own shadow, fill the frame. Ten seconds of care beats correcting figures later.
3. Batch the drawer. For a backlog, photograph everything, then extract in one run.
4. Set "Paid from" first — it's the one thing the bill can't tell the AI.
5. Only tick ITC on genuine tax invoices. Not on fuel, not on plain receipts.
6. Correct the ledger once and let it learn the vendor.
7. Always check the amount before approving. It's the field where an error costs you.
8. Keep the paper — GST and income-tax rules still require the original document, whatever your books say.

What's Next?

• Scan Bills with Mobile — more on the mobile workflow
• Import a Bank Statement with AI — for expenses paid straight from the bank
• GSTR-2B Reconciliation — confirm the input credit you claimed is actually available
• Video Tutorials in Hindi — more real product recordings