ScanToSheetMerchant runs and tool hire — captured on site, not in the van footwell
A trades business generates receipts faster than almost any other: three merchant runs in a day, a hire-shop ticket for a breaker, fuel, parking near a job with no loading bay, a skip. They live in a pocket, then the van footwell, then a carrier bag that reaches the accountant in February with half the ink gone. Worse, they belong to different jobs — and once they are mixed, working out what a job actually cost becomes guesswork. ScanToSheet turns each receipt into a row in your Google Sheet, on site, while you still know which job it belongs to.
Costed by job, not by shoebox
Each receipt is written as its own row with merchant, date, net, tax and gross, so adding a job or site column lets you total materials per job and compare it against what you quoted. That is the difference between knowing your margin and hoping for it.
Built for a trade where volume swings
A fit-out week produces dozens of receipts; a quiet week produces three. Paying per successful scan matches that shape, with no monthly fee sitting there in the slow weeks. Three scans are free, and a receipt too damaged to read is not charged.
Capture in seconds, with gloves on
The whole interaction is photograph and done — no forms to fill in at the merchant counter. Documents are processed in the EU under GDPR, stored encrypted, and deleted automatically after 24 hours, so nothing about your suppliers or pricing sits on a server.
What contractors typically deduct
Materials dominate, but the surrounding costs are substantial and are the ones most often lost between jobs:
- Materials and merchant purchases — timber, fixings and plasterboard for a single job
- Tool purchases — a replacement cordless drill mid-project
- Plant and tool hire — a breaker or scaffold tower hired for two days
- Van fuel and running costs — diesel between three sites in a day
- Van maintenance and tyres — a service or a new set of tyres
- Waste disposal — a skip or a tip run after a strip-out
- Parking and congestion charges — all-day parking near a job with no bay
- Protective equipment and workwear — boots, gloves, hi-vis, ear defenders
- Certification and training — a ticket renewal or a safety course
- Insurance — public liability and tool cover
- Subcontracted labour — a day rate paid to another trade
- Permits and inspections — a building-control or road-permit fee
Scan your first receipts free
Turn the pile you are carrying around into a clean, filterable ledger in your own Google Sheet.
Scan 3 receipts free€0.10 per scan after your 3 free · only successful scans are charged · no subscription
Frequently asked questions
Can I total materials per job?
Yes. Because every receipt is a separate row in your own sheet, adding a job-reference column and using a filter or pivot gives you materials by job in a few clicks. Most trades find the interesting number is not the total but the variance against what they quoted.
Will it read a long merchant receipt with dozens of line items?
It extracts the document-level fields you need for bookkeeping — merchant, date, net, tax, gross, currency and invoice ID — rather than every line item. For a merchant run, those are the fields your accountant works from and the ones a job cost is built on.
What about receipts that get wet or covered in dust?
Capture them the same day and most read fine. Site receipts degrade quickly, which is the argument for scanning at the van rather than at month end. If a receipt has deteriorated past readability, that scan is not charged.
Can more than one person on the team submit receipts?
Receipts are scanned from whichever account is signed in, and everything is written into the Google Sheet you connect — so the sheet itself can be shared with a bookkeeper or office manager in the normal way, with no extra seats to buy.
Receipt scanning for other professions
ScanToSheet — receipts to Google Sheets, by ActNow.