Automatically sort receipts by date

Automatically sorting receipts by date can be accomplished through different methods depending on whether you’re working with physical or digital receipts. Here’s how to do it:

For Digital Receipts (PDF, JPG, PNG, etc.)

1. Use a Receipt Management App

Apps like Expensify, Shoeboxed, Receipts by Wave, or QuickBooks automatically scan and sort receipts by date using OCR (Optical Character Recognition).

Benefits:

• Automatically extracts the date from the receipt

• Sorts and categorizes receipts

• Exports to spreadsheets or accounting software

2. Use Google Drive + Google Sheets + OCR Script

Upload scanned receipts to a Google Drive folder, then use a Google Apps Script to:

• Read receipt images with OCR (using Google Vision API or Tesseract)

• Extract date fields

• Populate a Google Sheet

• Sort rows by date

3. Custom Python Script with OCR

You can automate the process locally using Python:

python
CopyEdit
import os
import pytesseract
from PIL import Image
import re
from datetime import datetime

def extract_date(text):
    match = re.search(r'(d{2}/d{2}/d{4})|(d{4}-d{2}-d{2})', text)
    if match:
        date_str = match.group()
        try:
            return datetime.strptime(date_str, "%m/%d/%Y")
        except:
            return datetime.strptime(date_str, "%Y-%m-%d")
    return None

receipt_folder = 'path_to_receipts'
receipt_dates = []

for file in os.listdir(receipt_folder):
    if file.lower().endswith(('.png', '.jpg', '.jpeg')):
        img = Image.open(os.path.join(receipt_folder, file))
        text = pytesseract.image_to_string(img)
        date = extract_date(text)
        if date:
            receipt_dates.append((file, date))

sorted_receipts = sorted(receipt_dates, key=lambda x: x[1])

for file, date in sorted_receipts:
    print(f"{file} - {date.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')}")

For Physical Receipts

1. Use a Mobile Scanning App

Apps like Adobe Scan, CamScanner, or Microsoft Lens:

• Automatically recognize and extract text using OCR

• Name or tag scanned receipts by date

• Upload to cloud storage for organization

2. Scan and Rename by Date

After scanning physical receipts:

• Use OCR to extract date

• Rename files as YYYY-MM-DD_receipt_description.pdf

• Sort files alphabetically in your file explorer to get chronological order

Best Practices

• Use consistent date formatting (e.g., ISO: YYYY-MM-DD) for file names

• Store all receipts in a centralized folder, possibly grouped by year/month

• Use cloud platforms (Google Drive, Dropbox) with OCR indexing and sort features

• Regularly back up your receipts

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Automating receipt sorting by date not only saves time but also ensures accuracy in financial tracking and tax preparation.