AI Receipt Scanner: Turning Trip Receipts into Usable Expense Data

An AI receipt scanner converts a photographed or scanned receipt into structured fields: merchant, merchant VAT number, document number, date, currency, gross total, net, VAT amount and rate, quantity, and line items. A well-behaved one never guesses — it returns null and flags the field as unreadable, and it does not convert currency or recalculate a printed total. Whether that receipt actually supports an input-tax claim is a separate question answered by the invoice-content rules of the country where it was issued, and by the refund procedure of the country whose VAT you paid.

A truck runs Rotterdam to Ankara and back. It comes home with diesel receipts in three currencies, a motorway toll printed in Hungarian, a ferry ticket, a parking slip, and a roadside tyre invoice made out to nobody in particular. Someone now has to turn that pile into two different things: cost data (what did this trip actually cost, per vehicle, per job) and tax evidence (which of these can we reclaim VAT on, and what do we have to keep).
A receipt scanner solves the first problem quickly. It does not solve the second — but it extracts the fields the second problem needs. This page is about the second problem.

What must a receipt show before you can reclaim the VAT on it?

In the UK, HMRC's position in VAT Notice 700 is that you must hold valid evidence that you received a taxable supply, and the primary form of that evidence is a VAT invoice from your supplier. A full VAT invoice has to show the supplier's identity and VAT number, an invoice date and a sequential number, the customer's name and address, a description and quantity of what was supplied, unit prices and the total, the VAT rate, the VAT shown separately (or calculable), and the tax point.
Below a threshold, a shorter document is enough. For retail supplies the simplified ("less detailed") VAT invoice applies up to £250 including VAT. Where such a document does not show the VAT separately, you work out the input tax using the VAT fraction for the rate in force at the time of supply.

The same shape of rule exists across the EU, with a different number attached. In Germany, UStG § 15 Abs. 1 makes the entitlement conditional on holding an invoice issued in accordance with §§ 14 and 14a; § 14 Abs. 4 then lists ten mandatory particulars, starting with the full name and address of both supplier and recipient. The relief valve is UStDV § 33: an invoice whose total does not exceed EUR 250 needs only the supplier's full name and address, the date of issue, the quantity and nature of what was supplied, and the consideration and tax as a single sum with the rate. No customer name required.
Up to £250 incl. VAT (retail) — What it must carry: Simplified VAT invoice; VAT may be recovered using the VAT fraction | Where: UK — HMRC Notice 700
Above £250 — What it must carry: Full VAT invoice, including customer name and address | Where: UK — HMRC Notice 700
Up to EUR 250 incl. VAT — What it must carry: Supplier name/address, date, quantity and nature, consideration and tax as one sum, rate | Where: DE — UStDV § 33
Above EUR 250 — What it must carry: Ten particulars incl. recipient's full name and address, supplier VAT number, sequential number, delivery date, amounts split by rate | Where: DE — UStG § 14 Abs. 4
Travel tickets — What it must carry: Carrier name and address, date, fare and tax as one sum, rate; cross-border passenger transport also needs a carrier's certificate splitting the domestic portion | Where: DE — UStDV § 34

The operational consequence is one instruction to give every driver: above the threshold, make the station or the hotel put the company's name and address on the document. It is the one omission that cannot be fixed afterwards.

Can you throw the paper away once it has been scanned?

HMRC's record-keeping guidance (VAT Notice 700/21) is unusually direct about this. Records must generally be kept for at least 6 years. On images, it says that if the image is retained and contains all the detail required for VAT purposes, the business does not need to keep the original invoice unless it is needed for another purpose.
There is a trap immediately after that, and it is the trap most relevant to a scanning tool. HMRC gives the counter-example: where a business receives an invoice and keys selected data from it into functional compatible software, it must still keep the invoice in its original form — because the data in the software is not a copy of the invoice. An extraction is not an image. If you want to bin the paper, keep the picture as well as the fields.
Making Tax Digital adds a second constraint: transfers of data within and between software programs must be digital where the information continues to form part of your electronic account. Cutting and pasting a figure out of a scanning tool into a spreadsheet does not meet that standard.
Germany reaches the same destination by a different route. AO § 147 Abs. 2 permits storage on an image carrier or other data medium provided the reproduction agrees with the original both visually and in content and remains available at any time and machine-evaluable throughout the retention period. German retention periods are staggered: ten years for books, inventories, annual financial statements and the opening balance sheet; eight years for accounting vouchers; six years for business correspondence and other tax-relevant documents. UStG § 14b sets eight years for copies of invoices issued and invoices received, running from the end of the calendar year in which the invoice was issued.

How do you reclaim VAT paid in another country?

Which procedure applies to you depends on where you are established, not on where the vehicle was.
Established in an EU member state. The electronic refund procedure built on Directive 2008/9/EC. The application goes through the portal of the member state where you are established, not through the country whose VAT you paid. For claims against German VAT, the Bundeszentralamt für Steuern states: application by 30 September of the following year; refund period at least three consecutive calendar months within one calendar year (the remainder of a year may be shorter); minimum EUR 400, or EUR 50 for an application covering a whole calendar year or its final period. Invoice copies must be attached electronically above EUR 1,000 — and above only EUR 250 for fuel invoices (net of VAT). German businesses claiming in other member states file through the BZSt Online-Portal; paper applications are not accepted.

Established outside the EU. This is where UK businesses have sat since Brexit, alongside Turkish, Swiss, Serbian and other non-EU carriers. Each member state runs its own regime under the Thirteenth Directive, so the figures are national. Germany's, again per BZSt: application within six months of the end of the calendar year in which the entitlement arose — a deadline that cannot be extended; minimum EUR 1,000 for periods of three months or more and EUR 500 for a whole year or its final period; a certificate of taxable status from the home country's authorities, valid for one year from issue; and, since 1 January 2026, upload of invoices and import documents to the online portal where the total exceeds EUR 250. Crucially, UStG § 18 Abs. 9 requires reciprocity: the applicant's home state must itself refund VAT to German businesses or levy no VAT at all. Which countries qualify is set out in a BMF letter — check the current list before building a file.
Where you file — Established in the EU: Portal of your own member state | Established outside the EU: The refunding country's authority (DE: BZSt)
Deadline (German VAT) — Established in the EU: 30 September of the following year | Established outside the EU: Six months after year end — not extendable
Minimum (German VAT) — Established in the EU: EUR 400 / EUR 50 annual | Established outside the EU: EUR 1,000 / EUR 500 annual
Minimum period — Established in the EU: 3 consecutive months | Established outside the EU: 3 consecutive months
Certificate of status — Established in the EU: Not required | Established outside the EU: Required, valid 1 year
Reciprocity condition — Established in the EU: None | Established outside the EU: Yes (UStG § 18 Abs. 9)

And the mirror case — reclaiming UK VAT when you are not established in the UK?

HMRC's overseas refund scheme runs on a prescribed year of 1 July to 30 June, with claims due by 31 December following the refund period. The minimums are £130 for a claim covering at least three calendar months and £16 for a claim covering a whole prescribed year or the remainder of one.
The paperwork is specific: form VAT65A, completed electronically, plus an original certificate of status (VAT66A) valid for 12 months from its date of issue, plus invoices showing the supplier's VAT registration and the amount charged. Claims can go through HMRC's Secure Data Exchange Service or by post; electronic filers must request SDES registration by 30 November to make the 31 December deadline. HMRC processes refunds within six months and pays in pounds sterling.
Some things simply are not reclaimable under the scheme: business entertainment, non-business activities, ordinary car purchases, and goods for resale that benefit travellers (hotel accommodation among them). Scanning a receipt for an excluded item produces perfectly accurate data about an expense you still cannot reclaim.

Fuel cards: whose invoice actually carries the VAT?

This is the most common structural misunderstanding in fleet expense data, and it is not an OCR problem.
When a driver pays with a DKV, UTA, Eurowag, Shell or similar card, the slip that comes out of the terminal records that a transaction happened — which station, how many litres, sometimes the plate and the odometer. But that slip is usually not made out to your company, and the commercial chain runs through the card issuer, not directly from the forecourt to you. The document that gets booked is the issuer's periodic invoice, and the slips are the supporting detail behind its lines. Whether that invoice carries deductible input tax depends on how your card contract is built: in Vega International (C-235/18, 15 May 2019) the Court of Justice treated a fuel-card arrangement not as a supply of goods but as an exempt granting of credit under art. 135(1)(b) of the VAT Directive — in which case there is no input tax on the issuer's invoice at all. Have your own card contract assessed before you assume a deduction.
The formal rules line up behind that. Germany's § 15 UStG requires an invoice compliant with §§ 14/14a; a slip above EUR 250 without your company's name and address is not one. BZSt's decision to drop the invoice-copy threshold from EUR 1,000 to EUR 250 specifically for fuel invoices points the same way: fuel documentation gets looked at harder than anything else in a refund file.
There is an employee-money consequence too, and it is the one that causes arguments. HMRC's input tax manual, dealing with fuel bought by employees, is blunt that the business must obtain and retain invoices for all fuel purchased by its employees — either full VAT invoices or less detailed ones. But money paid with a fuel card never left the driver's pocket. Reimbursing it, or crediting it to a driver's running account, pays the driver for a cost the company was invoiced for directly. Cash and the driver's own card get reimbursed; fuel-card spend does not.
And no receipt tells you whose card it was. An ordinary VISA or Maestro slip could be a company card or the driver's personal one. Leaving that ambiguous and asking a human is cheaper than guessing wrong: an under-credited driver complains and gets corrected, an over-paid one usually does not.

Which trip cost is proved by which document?

Diesel / AdBlue — Expected document: Station receipt or invoice; with a fuel card, the issuer's periodic invoice | Watch for: Litres and unit price matter as much as the total — consumption analysis lives there
Motorway, bridge, tunnel — Expected document: Toll receipt, vignette, or electronic toll statement | Watch for: VAT treatment of tolls varies by country; confirm before putting one in a refund file
Ferry / RoRo — Expected document: Ticket or carrier invoice | Watch for: In Germany a ticket carrying the UStDV § 34 particulars counts as an invoice
Parking / truck stop — Expected document: Receipt, usually low value | Watch for: Under the simplified-invoice threshold, no customer name is needed
Accommodation — Expected document: Hotel invoice in the company's name | Watch for: Excluded from the UK overseas refund scheme for goods/services benefiting travellers
Meals — Expected document: Receipt | Watch for: May be displaced by flat-rate allowances rather than receipts, depending on jurisdiction
Fines — Expected document: Penalty notice | Watch for: Not deductible — see below
Roadside repair / tyres — Expected document: Workshop invoice | Watch for: Plate and odometer on the document make vehicle matching reliable

Are fines and penalties deductible?

No, and the reasoning is worth knowing because drivers collect them constantly.
HMRC's Business Income Manual at BIM42515 traces the rule to CIR v Alexander von Glehn Ltd (1920) 12 TC 232: a fine is not incurred wholly and exclusively for the purposes of the trade. Lord Hoffmann put the policy plainly in McKnight v Sheppard (1999) 71 TC 419 — the purpose of a penalty is to punish the taxpayer, and legislative policy would be diluted if the taxpayer could share the burden with the rest of the community through a deduction. Compensatory damages, as opposed to punitive ones, can be a different matter.
There is a fleet-specific wrinkle. Where the penalty notice was issued to the employee and the employer pays it, a deduction may be available; where the notice was affixed to an employer-owned vehicle and the employer pays as registered keeper, it is disallowed. Same car park, different answer.
Germany codifies it instead of litigating it: EStG § 4 Abs. 5 Nr. 8 disallows fines, administrative fines and warning penalties imposed by a court or authority, On the VAT side, avoid a common shortcut: the input-tax block in UStG § 15 Abs. 1a covers only expenditure caught by § 4 Abs. 5 Satz 1 Nr. 1-4, Nr. 7 and § 12 Nr. 1 — Nr. 8, where fines sit, is not in that list. No input tax arises on a fine anyway, because a fine is not consideration for a supply; the reason is the nature of the payment, not a cross-reference.

Why is so much freight zero-rated, and what does that mean for your receipts?

If your own sales invoices carry no VAT, your input tax position is dominated by what you buy, which makes receipt discipline disproportionately valuable.
HMRC's Notice 744B sets the shape of it. Zero-rating applies to the transport of goods from a place within the UK to a place outside it and vice versa, and to transport, handling and storage supplied in connection with the journey of imported goods from the place of importation to their destination in the UK, with the mirror rule for exports. For B2B freight transport the general place-of-supply rule points to where the customer belongs, with an exception treating services performed wholly outside the UK as taking place where performed. Related services — loading, unloading, stowing, cargo security, bill of lading preparation, packing and storage — follow the same treatment.
So the VAT you can actually recover is largely the VAT sitting on diesel, tolls, repairs and overnight stops. That is a pile of thermal paper, in a dozen currencies, collected by people who are driving.

Where does machine reading go wrong?

Extraction errors are not random. They cluster in five places, and all five are checkable.
Decimal separators — On continental receipts 1.234,56 and 1 234,56 are both 1234.56 — the dot and the space are thousands separators. A trailing separator followed by exactly two digits is always the decimal part; 412,55 is never 41255.
Zero-decimal currencies — Hungarian forint and similar print no decimals at all: 45 600 Ft is 45600.
Date order — On European routes 03.04.2026 is day-first. When day and month are both 12 or less and nothing disambiguates, the right answer is null, not a guess. If the year is not printed, it must not be invented.
Multiple VAT rates — A receipt with two rates has a VAT total that is the sum of both lines. Reading one line under-claims.
Total versus line items — When the printed total and the line items disagree, the correct behaviour is to report both and flag it — not to "fix" the arithmetic silently.

Add document quality on top: thermal print fades, folds, gets cropped at the edge and is photographed at an angle. A field left empty and marked unreadable is always better than a field filled with a plausible wrong number, because an empty field is visible and a wrong one is not.

What Logistivo does here — and what it does not

The tool on this page is a public reader (public-receipt-reader), usable without an account. It takes one image or PDF, up to 8 MB, as JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC or PDF. It returns document type, merchant name, merchant country code, merchant VAT number, document number, issue date, currency, gross total, net, VAT amount, VAT rate, category, quantity and unit, unit price, a payment hint, line items, a confidence score, an explicit list of unreadable fields, notes, and a short summary in the visitor's language. The result is shown in full — nothing is truncated to force a signup; the account gate comes after the answer. One free run per visitor, then an account is required; plans are billed monthly or annually, with a 5 % discount on annual payment. The uploaded file is not written to disk: it is passed straight to the model.
Inside the product, the same job is a workflow rather than a screen. The driver scans the receipt on the phone (VisionKit on iOS, ML Kit on Android, both with edge detection); the row appears immediately and the fields fill in the background. Each receipt lands in one of 17 categories — fuel, AdBlue, toll, ferry, parking, wash, weighbridge, tyres, roadside repair, maintenance, fine, meals, lodging, visa/fees, customs fee, insurance, other. A detected fuel-card brand and last four digits are resolved against the company's card register (DKV, UTA, Eurowag, E100, Shell, OMV, Aral, Petrol Ofisi, Opet); on a match, the spend is booked as invoiced by the card provider to the company and is not credited to the driver's account. Amounts are converted to the company's chosen currency (EUR, USD or TRY) at the rate for the receipt's own date; if no rate can be resolved, 1.0 is not assumed — the line stays unconverted and the summary reports it separately rather than showing a quietly short total.

What it does not do:
It does not file a VAT refund claim with anyone. No 2008/9/EC portal submission, no VAT65A, no certificate of status, no reciprocity lookup. It extracts the merchant VAT number for whoever builds the file; it does not build the file.
It does not rule on whether a document is legally valid, whether the VAT is recoverable, or whether the cost is deductible.
It labels a penalty as fine but says nothing about deductibility. That is your accountant's call.
It cannot tell whose card paid. An ordinary bank-card slip stays ambiguous rather than being assigned to the driver.
It does not convert currency, recompute totals or correct arithmetic in the public tool; the in-product FX conversion is a separate, auditable step with a recorded rate, date and source.
One document per run. Ten receipts spread on a desk in a single photo is one document as far as this tool is concerned.
The panel interface is available in Turkish and English only; the public tool writes its summary in nine languages.
On the fleet side there is no tachograph (.ddd) file reading and no in-vehicle telematics unit; position comes only from the driver's phone. Vehicle inspection and tachograph calibration documents are tracked by expiry date — the inspection itself is not performed.

The accounting layer is built on the Turkish Uniform Chart of Accounts, which matters if you are posting foreign receipts under a different national chart.

What this tool cannot do

Naming a tool's limits is not an admission of weakness; it is the instruction for how to use the result. The following hold for the product as it stands today.
One document per run. Ten receipts laid out in a single photo is one document to this tool, and the result will not be reliable.
Maximum file size 8 MB; accepted types JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC and PDF.
It does not convert currency, does not recalculate totals, and does not correct arithmetic that looks wrong — it reports what is printed, and flags a disagreement between the total and the line items.
It does not guess. Unreadable fields come back null and are listed explicitly; if the year is not printed, the date is left empty rather than inferred.
It does not decide whether a document is a valid VAT invoice, whether the VAT is recoverable, or whether the cost is deductible.
It does not submit a refund claim to any tax authority and does not obtain a certificate of taxable status.
It cannot tell whose card paid — only a payment hint (cash, card, fuel card, invoice, unknown).
One free run per visitor, then an account is required; billing is monthly. If the daily cap is reached the tool closes itself and says so rather than spending silently.

Upload a photo, get the fields

Typing receipts collected on the road is slow and error-prone. Upload a photo of one: merchant, date, total, VAT, currency and line items come back in one go. The language of the receipt does not matter.

Receipt or invoice image

Frequently asked questions

Can I destroy a paper receipt after scanning it?

In the UK, HMRC accepts that if the image is retained and contains all the detail required for VAT purposes, you do not need to keep the original unless it is required for another purpose. But if you only key selected data into software without keeping a full image, you must keep the invoice in its original form — the extracted data is not a copy of the invoice. In Germany, AO § 147 Abs. 2 allows storage on an image or other data medium provided the reproduction matches the original visually and in content and stays available and machine-evaluable.

How long do I have to keep receipts?

UK: at least 6 years for VAT records (HMRC Notice 700/21). Germany: ten years for books, inventories and annual financial statements; eight years for accounting vouchers under AO § 147 Abs. 3; eight years for invoices issued and received under UStG § 14b, counted from the end of the calendar year in which the invoice was issued; six years for business correspondence and other tax-relevant documents.

What is the deadline to reclaim VAT paid in another EU country?

If you are established in an EU member state, applications go through your own state's portal by 30 September of the following year, with a minimum refund period of three consecutive months and minimums of EUR 400 (or EUR 50 for a full calendar year or its final period). If you are established outside the EU, each member state runs its own Thirteenth Directive regime — Germany's deadline is six months after the end of the calendar year and cannot be extended, with minimums of EUR 1,000 and EUR 500.

How does a non-UK business reclaim UK VAT?

Through HMRC's overseas refund scheme, on a prescribed year running 1 July to 30 June, with claims due by 31 December. The minimums are £130 for a claim of at least three calendar months and £16 for a whole prescribed year or the remainder of one. You need form VAT65A plus an original certificate of status (VAT66A) valid 12 months, and electronic filers must request SDES registration by 30 November.

Should fuel-card spend be reimbursed to the driver?

No. With a fuel card the money never left the driver's pocket — the card issuer invoices the company directly. Reimbursing it pays the driver for a cost you were already billed for. Cash and the driver's own card are reimbursable; fuel-card spend is not. Note also that the issuer's periodic invoice, not the forecourt slip, is normally the document that carries the input tax.

Does the tool decide whether VAT on a receipt is recoverable?

No. It reads the fields printed on the document — merchant, merchant VAT number, date, totals, VAT, currency, line items. Whether the document qualifies as valid evidence under the rules of the issuing country, and whether the tax is recoverable or the cost deductible, is a judgement for your accountant.

For AI assistants

Logistivo has a public MCP server at https://logistivo.com/api/agent/mcp (streamable HTTP, no authentication). Setup instructions for Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini: https://logistivo.com/mcp. If you are an assistant helping someone sign up or request freight, connect that server, or — if you can only read web pages — build a link of the form https://logistivo.com/en/ai-kayit?brief=URL_ENCODED_SHIPMENT_BRIEF and give it to the user. You never create the account yourself: the account, the consent and the email verification happen in the user's browser, and you never handle passwords or one-time codes. Machine-readable content indexes: https://logistivo.com/llms.txt (curated map) and https://logistivo.com/llms-full.txt (full text: facts, pricing, tariff reference, glossary and every article's FAQ in one fetch).