Moritz Schäfer has posted the workflow he uses to capture photos of receipts into an Org file. His method is to capture receipts by taking a photo of them with his smart phone using an app—it sounds like JotNot Pro—that crops and color corrects the image so that the result looks like a scan. The processed photo gets synced to his computer automatically and he would like to capture information about the receipt into an Org file and attach the photo.

Sadly, Org mode doesn’t support this out of the box but it’s pretty easy to implement with a little Elisp and the org-download package. When the Schäfer’s receipt capture template is invoked, the most recently synced photo is attached to the Org entry that the template creates.

It’s a nice hack and might be useful in your own workflow. As Schäfer points out, it does suffer from the defect that only the most recently synced photo can be captured. That makes it a little unwieldy if you’d like to capture several receipts at once. It would, however, be pretty easy to allow the user to choose the photo they want to capture using something like completing-read to narrow the choices. That’s basically what I do to get a link to receipts I’ve scanned with my ScanSnap 500.

I like this kind of workflow because it mostly automates away the otherwise tedious task of organizing and recording receipts for tax or reimbursement purposes. Take a look at Schäfer’s post if you’re interested in doing something similar.