Turn a Folder of Receipts Into an Expense Report

Expense reports are almost entirely mechanical work that still somehow takes half an hour. You have a pile of receipts, you need a spreadsheet, and the only thing standing between them is tedious re-keying. Cowork closes that gap in a couple of minutes.

What to Put in the Folder

Before you run anything, gather your receipts into a single folder. A good name is something like expenses-june-2026. Drop in whatever you have:

• Phone photos of paper receipts (JPG or PNG)
• PDF receipts from email confirmations
• Screenshots of digital purchases

One receipt per file works best. If you have a single PDF with multiple receipts scanned together, Cowork will try to parse them all, but the row count may not match what you expect. Split those before you start if you can.

If you know some receipts need special treatment (a client dinner that needs to be split between Meals and Entertainment, or a charge in a foreign currency with a specific approved rate), drop a plain text note file in the folder explaining it. Cowork will read that too and can factor it into the output.

The Prompt

Open Cowork and point it at the receipts folder. Then paste this:

I have a folder of receipt files (images and PDFs). Read every file in the folder. For each receipt, extract: vendor name, date, total amount, currency, and the most likely expense category (Travel, Meals, Software, Office Supplies, or Other). If a field is unclear, note it as 'unclear' rather than guessing. Then create a file called expense-report.xlsx with one row per receipt, columns for Vendor, Date, Amount, Currency, Category, and Notes (use Notes to flag anything unclear or that needs a second look). Add a totals row at the bottom grouped by category. Save the file in the same folder.

That is the whole thing. No setup beyond pointing Cowork at the folder.

How Cowork Reads the Files

Cowork treats your connected folder like a shared desk. Every file on that desk is readable. When it encounters a receipt image, it reads the visual content directly, the same way you would if you looked at a photo. For PDFs, it reads the embedded text if the PDF has it, or reads the page visually if it is a scanned document.

This means photo quality matters. A crisp, well-lit photo of a paper receipt is easy. A blurry sideways shot taken in a dim restaurant is harder. The prompt instructs Cowork to flag unclear fields rather than invent numbers. You want that behavior. A cell that says “unclear” is honest; a cell with a wrong number is a problem.

What the Output Looks Like

The resulting expense-report.xlsx will have one row per receipt file, the columns you specified, and a totals block at the bottom. The totals row groups by category, so you can see at a glance that you spent, say, $340 on Travel and $87 on Meals.

The Notes column is where Cowork puts anything it is not confident about. Common entries there:

• “Amount unclear, possible values $12.50 or $72.50” (a 1 and 7 that looked similar in a photo)
• “Date not visible on receipt”
• “Category uncertain, could be Software or Office Supplies”

Go through the Notes column before you submit. These flags are the things that would have turned into wrong numbers if Cowork had just picked one.

Checking the Numbers

Do not submit the spreadsheet without a spot-check. The check does not have to be exhaustive. Pull out three or four receipts at random, look at the amounts on the actual receipt, and confirm they match the spreadsheet. If you find a discrepancy, look at the Notes column for that row first. If there is no flag and the number is still wrong, you likely have a photo quality issue.

The totals row is worth checking against your credit card statement if you have one. If the sum in the spreadsheet and the sum on the statement are close but not identical, the gap is usually a currency conversion or a receipt you forgot to drop in the folder.

Categories You May Want to Adjust

The prompt uses five categories as a starting point: Travel, Meals, Software, Office Supplies, Other. If your company uses different category names, swap them in the prompt before you run it. It takes ten seconds and saves you from renaming a whole column in the spreadsheet afterward.

If you have a long list of categories (ten or more), paste them into the prompt as a numbered list rather than a comma-separated string. Cowork handles lists cleanly and is less likely to pick an approximate match when the options are laid out clearly.

Connectors Worth Knowing About

The basic workflow above reads files already in the folder. If you want Cowork to pull receipts from your email automatically, that requires the Gmail or Outlook connector. If you store receipts in Google Drive, the Drive connector handles the sync. Those connectors are optional for the core task but save the manual download step if you deal with a lot of email receipts.