Kayabyte

Receipt to CSV on a Mac

By Kayabyte · Last updated 29 October 2026

Receipts pile up as photos, email PDFs and crumpled paper. Expense reports and bookkeeping want rows: date, merchant, total, tax, and sometimes the items. Here is a way to get there that keeps the images on your Mac.

1. Get a clean image

Photograph the receipt flat, in good light, against a plain background, with the whole receipt in frame. Scans at 200 to 300 dpi work best. For email receipts, save the PDF.

2. Type it, or copy it

For a few receipts, typing date, merchant and total into a spreadsheet is fine. Copy and paste works for PDFs with real text. Photos need text recognition; Preview and Live Text on a Mac can copy text out of an image, though not in a table.

3. Check what you captured

A receipt has built-in checks: the items add up to the subtotal, the subtotal plus tax equals the total. Compare them before you file the row.

4. Where Balanced helps

Balanced reads receipt photos, scans and PDFs on your Mac using Apple’s on-device text recognition and fixed rules, not AI. It shows the header (merchant, date, currency, subtotal, tax, total) and the line items, runs the checks above and marks lines that do not add up. A receipt that shows only a total is shown as not checkable. Export as CSV or Excel, one row per receipt or one row per item, and combine many receipts into one file. Nothing is uploaded.

Honest limits: invoices vary a lot, so check the header and the line table in the preview; a poor scan or a photo taken at an angle can misread digits (the checks usually catch it); a password-protected PDF has to be unlocked first. Nothing here is accounting or tax advice. Faint thermal paper and crumpled receipts are the hardest cases.

Download Balanced and try it free: the free version reads and checks everything, exports up to 3 invoices in one file, and needs Pro beyond that. Pro is USD 59 per year or USD 7.99 per month, for up to 3 Macs. See pricing and the help page. macOS 14 or later.