Extract merchant, date, amount, tax, and line items from any receipt format directly into a shared Google Sheet. Perfect for expense tracking and reconciliation.
Honestly, receipts are the worst document type to deal with. I've seen thermal paper so faded it looked like a ghost of a receipt — technically present, completely unreadable. And phone photos? Taken at midnight in a parking lot, slightly blurry, thumb covering the total.
Every receipt is its own snowflake. A gas station printout looks nothing like a restaurant check, which looks nothing like a Staples receipt from three years ago.
Generic OCR tools don't know any of this. They treat a crumpled Chipotle receipt like a typed memo and hand you back gibberish. Tools built for invoices assume a table structure that receipts simply don't have.
Lido's extraction engine has seen a lot of receipts — gas stations, coffee shops, hotel folios, restaurant checks. The vision model figures out where the relevant fields are regardless of layout, without you configuring templates or mapping columns yourself.
Merchant name, date, total, tax, line items — it all lands in a Google Sheet with consistent columns. Same structure every time, whether you're uploading a clean PDF or a photo of a receipt you found crumpled at the bottom of your bag.
In my experience, the first time people run it on a genuinely bad photo, they're surprised it got anything useful out of it. It usually does.
Capture: Employees photograph receipts on their phone or forward receipt emails to a dedicated intake address. No special app, no training required.
Extract: The AI behind this pulls merchant name, date, amount, tax, and category into a shared Google Sheet automatically.
Review: Finance sorts by employee, filters by date range or amount, and flags anything that needs clarification — without ever leaving Sheets.
Export: Once approved, export to CSV for your accounting software or connect directly via API.
They're good products. If you need a full pipeline — capture, approval, reimbursement, accounting integration — Expensify and Dext are built for exactly that, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
But a lot of teams don't need all that. Last month I talked to a 12-person agency that had been paying for Expensify for two years and using maybe 20% of it — they just wanted receipt data in a spreadsheet their accountant could open.
If that's you, a Google Sheet with extracted receipt data plus a few SUM formulas is genuinely all the expense tracking you need. One fewer subscription, zero onboarding.
Drop in a receipt photo or PDF — even a bad one. Merchant, amount, and line items show up in Sheets.
50 free pages. All features included. No credit card required.