Expense season arrives and your receipts are everywhere: photos in your camera roll, paper slips in a drawer, email confirmations in your inbox. Accounting wants one file, not twelve attachments. Here is a simple workflow that turns the pile into a single clean PDF in about ten minutes.
Step 1: Get every receipt into the same format
Start by collecting everything. Photograph the paper receipts with your phone in good light, keeping each one flat and fully in frame. Download the email receipts as PDFs or print them to PDF from your browser. The goal is simple: every receipt becomes a PDF page or an image file, all in one folder.
If a receipt photo is crooked or hard to read, retake it now. A blurry receipt merged into a PDF is still a blurry receipt, and accounting will send it back.
Step 2: Merge everything into one PDF
Open Trencada Merge PDF and add your files in the order you want them to appear. A sensible order is chronological, oldest first, so the expense report reads like a timeline. If you have image files mixed in with PDFs, convert the images to PDF first with the image to PDF converter, then merge the full set.
Arrange the pages, merge, and download the result. One file, every receipt, in order.
Step 3: Compress it if it is too big to email
Phone photos make heavy PDFs, and a thirty page receipt file can easily blow past email attachment limits. If your mail app bounces it, run the merged file through Trencada Compress PDF to shrink it down to a sendable size, then attach and send.
A few habits that make next time painless
Photograph receipts the day you get them. A two minute habit beats a two hour rescue mission at month end. Keep a single album or folder on your phone called Receipts.
Name files with dates. A file called 2026-10-03-taxi.jpg sorts itself and tells you what it is without opening it. Do this at capture time and the merge step takes seconds.
Keep the originals until you are reimbursed. The merged PDF is for submission, but hold onto the paper slips and original photos until the money lands. If anything is questioned, you have the source.
The ten minute version
Collect every receipt as a PDF or photo, merge them into one file in chronological order, compress if it is too big to email. One tidy PDF, one email, done.
Start here: merge your receipts into one PDF.
