Electrical
Job expense and receipt tracking field guide for electrical contractors
Capture every material buy, PO, fuel charge, rental, and reimbursable against the right job so it gets billed, costed, and deducted instead of lost in the truck.
Direct answer
Job expense tracking is capturing every material purchase, PO, fuel charge, rental, and reimbursable against the right job, so each cost gets billed, costed, and deducted. A receipt lost in the truck is money lost three ways: an unbilled cost, a fake job margin, and a deduction the IRS will deny without proof.
Key takeaways
- A lost receipt costs three ways: an unbilled cost, a fake job margin that misprices the next bid, and a denied tax deduction.
- Photograph every receipt at the counter and tag it to the job and cost code before it leaves your hand.
- A three-way match checks the PO, the receiving record, and the supplier invoice agree on price and quantity before you pay.
- Reimbursable material commonly carries around 10 to 15 percent markup, but the contract sets the number and some specs cap it.
- IRS record retention runs three years generally, six if income is understated over 25 percent, and seven for bad-debt claims.
What job expense tracking is, and why a lost receipt is lost money
Job expense tracking is the practice of capturing every cost a job consumes outside of labor, the material, the purchase orders, the fuel, the rentals, the small reimbursables, and tying each one to the job it belongs to so it can be billed, costed, and deducted. Labor has its own system. This is everything else that hits the job, and most of it walks in the door as a paper receipt from the supply house counter.
The trouble is where that receipt lives. The field buys parts at the counter all day. A breaker here, a roll of wire there, a fitting run nobody planned for. Each one prints a thermal receipt that goes in a shirt pocket, a cup holder, or the floor of the truck, and by Friday half of them are gone or faded to a blank gray slip. A receipt you cannot find is a cost you cannot bill, cannot cost, and cannot deduct.
That is the whole problem in one line. The money is not lost at the register. It is lost between the counter and the office. This guide is about closing that gap. It sits next to two others: the job costing guide covers what you do with these costs once they land, and the time tracking guide covers labor, the one big cost this guide leaves alone.
A lost receipt costs you three ways
A lost receipt costs you three separate ways, and most shops only feel one of them.
First, the bill. If the part was reimbursable or the job is cost-plus, a receipt you cannot produce is a line you cannot invoice. The customer owes you for that material and you eat it instead, quietly, on every job where a receipt went missing. Second, the cost. Job costing only works if every cost lands against the job. A missing receipt makes the job look more profitable than it was, so you bid the next one off a fake margin and lose money the same way again. Third, the deduction. The IRS position is straightforward: no receipt, no deduction. The expense was real, you paid cash for it, and at tax time you cannot prove it, so you pay tax on money you already spent.
There is a fourth reason that is less about the single receipt and more about the pile. Expenses you capture as they happen let you watch a job against its budget while it is still running. Expenses you reconstruct at month end only tell you a job went over after the money is gone. Catch the overspend in week two and you can still do something. Find it at closeout and you are writing it off.
How do you capture receipts in the field?
Snap the receipt at the counter, attach it to the job, and you are done. Not Friday, not at month end, at the counter, before the receipt leaves your hand. The single highest-value habit in expense tracking is moving capture to the moment of purchase, because that is the only moment you are guaranteed to have the receipt, the job in your head, and a free hand.
The shoebox approach loses on two fronts. Receipts go missing, and the ones that survive go blank. Supply house receipts print on thermal paper, which fades with heat, sunlight, and time. A receipt that rode on the dash through a summer is a gray rectangle by the time the bookkeeper needs it. Photograph it the day you get it and the image is permanent even after the paper is unreadable.
This is the part a field tool earns its keep on. With FieldOS, the tech opens the job on the phone, taps to add an expense, photographs the receipt, and the photo is tied to that job before they leave the parking lot. The amount, the supplier, and the job are captured together while the tech still remembers what the parts were for. No pile to sort, no memory to reconstruct, no faded slip to squint at three weeks later.
Code every expense to the job and the cost code
A captured receipt that is not coded to a job is half a record. The dollar amount is real but it floats, and at month end someone has to guess which job a counter run belonged to. They guess wrong often enough that the job cost is fiction. Every expense needs two tags at capture: the job, and the cost code within the job.
The cost code is what makes the expense useful instead of just present. Material to the rough-in, gear to the service, a rental to the trim, each lands in the category the estimate used, so the actual cost lines up against the estimated cost line by line. That side-by-side is the job costing guide's whole subject, and it only works if the expense carried its job and cost code from the start. Tag it at the counter and the office has nothing to reconstruct. Leave it untagged and the office is doing detective work on a stack of slips, getting it half right.
The discipline is simple to state and easy to skip: no expense without a job. A receipt with no job attached gets coded to overhead by default, which means a billable cost just became your cost.
The purchase order: authorize the spend before it happens
A purchase order controls spend before the money goes out, instead of leaving you to find out after. The PO is issued against a job, it names what is being bought and the agreed price, and it carries a number the supplier puts on the invoice. Now the spend is authorized, attached to a job, and traceable from the start.
On small counter buys a formal PO is overkill, and shops that try to PO every spool of tape give up on the system in a week. Use POs where the dollars justify it: gear packages, switchgear, large material orders, anything you negotiated a price on and want to hold the supplier to. The point of the PO is the price and the authorization. When the invoice comes in at a different number than the PO said, the PO is the document that proves what you agreed to pay.
A PO system also stops the quiet over-ordering that pads a job. When a buy has to go through a PO, someone with the budget in front of them sees it before it ships, not after it is billed.
What is a three-way match?
A three-way match is checking the purchase order, the receiving record, and the supplier invoice against each other before you pay, so the price, the quantity, and what actually showed up all agree. The PO says what you ordered and the price you agreed to. The receiving record, the packing slip or the field confirmation, says what arrived. The invoice says what the supplier wants to be paid. Match all three and you pay. Any mismatch gets held.
This is the single best defense against paying for material you never got or paying a price you never agreed to. Suppliers bill the wrong price, double-bill a delivery, or charge for the full order when half of it backordered. Without the three-way match, those errors get paid because the invoice looks like every other invoice. With it, the held invoice is the one that saves you the money.
You do not need a corporate accounts-payable department to do this. The foreman who confirms the delivery against the packing slip and the office that matches the invoice to the PO are doing the three-way match by hand. The discipline matters more than the software.
Reconcile the supplier statement to the jobs
Once a month every supply house sends a statement listing every charge on your account for the period. Reconcile it. Match each line on the statement to a receipt or invoice you have already captured and coded to a job, and you catch two things at once. You catch charges that are wrong, the duplicate, the buy that belongs to another contractor, the return that was never credited. And you catch your own gaps, the counter runs that hit the account but never made it into your records.
The statement is the backstop for capture. If a receipt got lost between the counter and the office, the supplier statement is where it reappears, because the supplier never forgets to bill you. Reconciling monthly means the lost receipt surfaces while the tech can still remember the job, not a year later when the account is a mystery.
Run it unreconciled too long and the account becomes a slush fund nobody can tie to work. That is where wrong charges live undisturbed, and where your own missed costs quietly become overhead.
Company cards: a card per tech, a receipt per charge
A card per tech beats petty cash and personal cards billed back later, on one condition: every charge needs a receipt, no exceptions. The card statement tells you the amount and the merchant. It does not tell you what was bought or which job it was for, and the merchant name is often useless. A receipt attached to the charge, coded to the job, is what turns a card line into a job cost.
Set the controls to match the trust. Per-card limits, both per transaction and per month, so a lost or misused card has a ceiling. Merchant categories where they make sense, so a card meant for the supply house and the fuel pump cannot buy electronics. The limits are not about distrust. They bound the damage when a card walks off, which it will.
The rule that makes the whole thing work is the one shops hate to enforce: no receipt, no reimbursement, no exception for the guy who swears he bought breakers. Enforce it once and the receipts start showing up. Make exceptions and you are back to guessing.
Fuel and mileage, by vehicle and by job
Fuel and mileage are real money and real deductions, and most shops track neither well. Capture fuel at the pump the same way you capture a parts receipt: photograph it, tie it to the vehicle, and where the trip was for one job, tie it to the job. Fuel on a dedicated site truck is a job cost. Fuel on the service van that hit six calls is overhead spread across the route.
Mileage matters for the deduction. The IRS lets a business deduct vehicle costs by the standard mileage rate or by actual expense, and either way the deduction rests on records: the miles driven, the date, the business purpose. No log, no deduction, same as a receipt. A van that runs all year with no mileage record is a deduction you earned and cannot claim.
Decide vehicle by vehicle whether you are running actual cost or standard mileage, because you generally cannot switch between them freely on the same vehicle, and confirm the current rate and the rules with your accountant. The method and the rate change, and the records that back either one do not keep themselves.
Equipment rentals: bill it to the job, return it on time
A rental is a cost that bills two ways and gets missed both ways. It is a job cost the moment it leaves the rental yard, so it has to land against the job like any material. And on a cost-plus or reimbursable job, the rental is usually billable to the customer, so a rental receipt that goes missing is a charge you swallow.
The second leak is time. A trencher rented by the day and returned three days late is three days you pay for and often cannot bill, because the customer agreed to the work, not your late return. Track the out date and the expected return on the job, and the rental comes back when the work is done instead of when someone notices it sitting on site. A rental left running on a job that finished last week is pure margin walking out the door.
Capture the rental ticket to the job at pickup, flag it billable if the contract makes it billable, and set the return. Three small steps, and the rental stops being the cost everyone forgets until the yard sends the bill.
How do you bill a reimbursable expense?
Flag the expense as reimbursable at capture, apply the markup the contract allows, and put it on the invoice with its backup. The fork happens the moment the expense is captured: this cost gets billed back to the customer, or this cost is overhead the company eats. Get that flag right at the counter and the billing is automatic. Get it wrong or skip it and reimbursables die in the pile, uninvoiced.
Reimbursables carry a markup, and the markup is not gravy. It covers the cost of fronting the money, handling the material, and carrying the risk. A common reimbursable markup runs around 10 to 15 percent on materials, but the contract sets the number and some specs cap it, so the agreement controls, not habit. On a cost-plus job the markup is spelled out in the contract.
The expense that is overhead, the shop supplies, the truck stock, the office costs, does not go on a customer invoice at all. It comes out of margin and gets recovered through your overhead rate. The discipline is keeping the two straight at capture, because once the receipt is in the pile, nobody remembers which was which.
The deduction: no receipt, no write-off
Every legitimate business expense is deductible, and every deduction rests on proof. The IRS position is consistent: to deduct an expense you have to be able to substantiate it, and without a receipt or equivalent record the deduction can be denied. The expense being real is not enough. You have to prove it was real and prove it was business.
This is where lost receipts cost the most and hurt the quietest. The material was real, you paid for it, the job used it, and at tax time it does not exist because the slip faded or vanished. You pay tax on income you spent on the job. Across a year of counter runs, missing receipts can add up to a five-figure deduction you earned and threw away in the cab of a truck.
The categories and the rules are not for this guide to settle. Some expenses are fully deductible, some are partial, some are capitalized and depreciated instead of expensed, and the lines move with the tax code. Capture and keep the records, code them clean, and let your accountant decide the treatment. The records are your job. The tax law is theirs, so confirm the specifics with them.
Approve expenses, and catch the personal charge
Someone other than the buyer should approve expenses before they post, because the approval step is where personal charges and fraud get caught. It does not have to be heavy. A foreman or owner reviewing the week's expenses against the jobs catches the charge that does not fit: the personal fuel-up on the company card, the tools that went home, the supplier run that does not match any job in progress.
The tell is usually the missing or mismatched detail. A charge with no receipt, a receipt that does not match the merchant, a buy on a job that was already closed, an amount that does not fit the work. None of those prove fraud on their own, but they are the threads you pull. Most expense fraud in a trade shop is not elaborate. It is small personal charges that ride along because nobody is looking, and they add up.
The approval also catches honest errors before they become job cost. The expense coded to the wrong job, the reimbursable that should have been overhead, the duplicate. Better to fix it in review than to find it in a customer dispute or a year-end scramble.
How do you catch a job going over on expenses?
Watch expense against budget while the job runs, not after it closes. Every job has an expected material and expense number from the estimate. Set the captured expenses against that number as they land, and the overspend shows up as a trend you can act on instead of a surprise at closeout.
The reason this only works with live capture is timing. A job that is 40 percent done and has already spent 70 percent of its material budget is telling you something while you can still respond: re-check the takeoff, find the leak, tighten the buying. Find that same overspend at the final reconciliation and the only move left is to record the loss. The difference between catching it and recording it is whether the expenses were captured as they happened or piled up for later.
This ties straight into job costing, covered in its own guide. Expense versus budget is one input to the larger estimate-versus-actual picture across labor, material, equipment, and subs. Material and expense overspend is usually the first signal to move, because material lands faster and earlier than the labor overrun does.
Expenses into the books, entered once
An expense should be entered once, at capture, and flow to the accounting system from there. The double-entry trap is where most shops lose time: the receipt gets keyed into a field log, then keyed again into QuickBooks or the accounting package, by hand, by someone reading a stack of slips. Twice the work, and the second entry is where the typos and the mismatches creep in.
When the field capture feeds the books directly, the expense, its job, its cost code, and the receipt image move as one record. The bookkeeper reviews and approves instead of re-typing. The job cost and the general ledger see the same number because it is the same entry, not two entries that have to be reconciled later.
This is the second place a field tool pays for itself. FieldOS captures the expense in the field with the job and the receipt photo attached, then hands a clean, coded record to the accounting system, so the cost lands in the books and on the job cost without anyone keying it twice. The bookkeeper's month end goes from data entry to review. That is the difference between books that are a week behind and books that are a day behind.
Keep the records: retention and the audit
Keep your expense records long enough to survive an audit, which is longer than most contractors think. The IRS general rule is to keep records that support an item on a return for at least three years from when you filed, because that is the usual window to assess additional tax. Several common situations push it longer.
If income is understated by more than 25 percent, the IRS window stretches to six years. Claims tied to bad debt or worthless securities reach back seven years. Employment tax records run at least four years. And records for property, the equipment and vehicles you depreciate, have to be kept until the period of limitations runs out for the year you dispose of the property, which can be many years past the purchase. Those are the federal general rules, and your state and your specific situation can differ.
The practical answer is to keep the digital records indefinitely, because storage is cheap and the cost of not having a record is the disallowed deduction plus the penalty. A photographed, coded receipt in a system does not take up a filing cabinet and does not fade. Confirm the retention periods that apply to you with your accountant, and when in doubt, keep it.
Digital capture vs the shoebox
The shoebox loses receipts and the digital system keeps them, and the gap is not close. A physical receipt has to survive the truck, the jobsite, the wash cycle in a forgotten pocket, and the thermal fade, then get sorted, keyed, and filed by hand. Every step is a place to lose it. Most shops lose plenty.
Digital capture means a photo, run through OCR that reads the amount and the merchant off the image, coded to the job, and synced to one place every other system can reach. The photo is the record the IRS accepts, and unlike the paper it does not fade. OCR pulls the numbers so nobody types them. The sync means the foreman's capture and the bookkeeper's books are looking at the same record, not two copies a month apart.
FieldOS is built for the field side of this: capture at the counter, OCR the receipt, tie it to the job, sync it to the office. The point is not that digital is tidier. It is that the receipt you photograph at the counter still exists, still legible, still attached to its job, at tax time. The one in the shoebox is a coin flip.
The field captures, the office codes and pays
The cleanest expense process splits the work along the line that already exists between the field and the office. The field captures: snap the receipt, attach the job, flag it billable if it is. That is all the field should have to do, because the field is busy and has the receipt and the job in hand right then. Anything more and capture does not happen.
The office codes and pays: confirm the cost code, match the invoice to the PO, run the three-way match, approve, and push it to the books and the customer invoice. The office has the budget, the contract, and the accounting in front of it, which the field does not. Asking the field to do the office's coding is how you get expenses coded wrong, and asking the office to do the field's capture is how you get expenses that were never captured at all.
A field tool has to respect that handoff. FieldOS keeps the field side to three taps, snap, attach to job, flag, and hands the office a coded-enough record to finish. The field never has to think about the general ledger, and the office never has to chase a tech for a receipt that was caught at the counter. That clean handoff is what makes the system run without friction between the truck and the desk.
The numbers that tell you it is working
Three numbers tell you whether your expense tracking is actually working, and all three are leading indicators, not lagging ones.
Expense against budget, per job, in progress, tells you which jobs are running hot before they close. Unbilled reimbursables, the dollar value of billable expenses captured but not yet invoiced, tells you how much of your own money is sitting on customers' jobs waiting to be billed back. That number should stay small and current. When it grows, reimbursables are dying in the pile. Missing receipts, the count of card charges and account lines with no receipt attached, tells you whether capture is happening at all. A rising missing-receipt count is the early warning that deductions and bills are leaking, weeks before the lost money shows up anywhere else.
| Metric | What it tells you | Bad sign |
|---|---|---|
| Expense vs budget per job | Whether a job is running over on material and expense | Spend pace ahead of completion pace |
| Unbilled reimbursables ($) | Billable expense captured but not yet invoiced | Number grows or ages past a billing cycle |
| Missing receipts (count) | Whether capture is happening at the source | Count rising month over month |
| Days to capture | Lag between purchase and receipt in the system | Most receipts land days later, not same day |
Commercial work: cost-plus and reimbursable billing
Commercial and public work raises the stakes on expense records, because the billing itself depends on them. On a cost-plus contract you bill the actual cost plus the agreed fee, which means every cost you bill has to have backup the owner can audit. On AIA-style billing, the G702 and G703 carry the application for payment, and the reimbursable lines need receipts, invoices, and delivery slips behind them. If it is not documented, it does not get paid.
Public and institutional owners are strict about this. Many require a receipt or invoice for every reimbursable line, with no summaries accepted. A missing receipt on a cost-plus job is not just a lost deduction, it is a line the owner strikes from your payment application. The capture discipline that protects your taxes is the same discipline that gets your cost-plus invoice paid in full. Confirm the documentation requirements in the contract before the job starts, not at the first pay application.
Where expense tracking breaks down
Expense tracking fails in a handful of predictable ways, and they share a root: the record was never made, or never made right, at the moment of the spend.
Receipts in a shoebox is the first and worst. They get lost or they fade, and a receipt nobody can read is a cost nobody can bill, cost, or deduct. Next is the expense that was captured but never tied to a job, so the cost floats and the job cost is wrong. Then the buy with no PO and no three-way match, which is how you pay a wrong price or a double bill and never notice. Then the reimbursable that never got billed, because nobody flagged it and it drowned in the pile, so you fronted the customer's material for free. Then no receipt at tax time, so a real deduction is denied. And last, the personal charge that slides through because no one approves expenses, small enough to ignore and frequent enough to matter.
Every one of these is a capture-or-coding failure, not an accounting failure. The fix is upstream, at the counter, where the cost is born.
What to document
Every expense type has a capture moment and a note that has to ride with it. Miss the moment and you are reconstructing. Miss the note and the office is guessing.
| Expense type | How to capture | Note to attach |
|---|---|---|
| Counter material buy | Photo the receipt at the counter | Job, cost code, billable or overhead |
| Purchase order | Issue against the job before the buy | PO number, agreed price, supplier |
| Supplier invoice | Match to the PO and the receiving record | Three-way match result, job |
| Company card charge | Photo the receipt at point of sale | Job, what was bought, billable flag |
| Fuel | Photo the pump receipt | Vehicle, job if a single-job trip |
| Mileage | Log the miles, date, and purpose | Vehicle, business purpose |
| Equipment rental | Photo the rental ticket at pickup | Job, out date, expected return, billable flag |
| Reimbursable | Flag billable at capture | Markup per contract, backup attached |
Common mistakes
- Letting receipts pile in the truck or a shoebox where they fade or vanish before capture.
- Capturing an expense without tagging the job and the cost code, so the job cost comes out wrong.
- Skipping the PO and the three-way match, then paying a wrong price or a double bill.
- Capturing a reimbursable but never flagging it billable, so it never reaches the invoice.
- Having no receipt to back a deduction at tax time and losing the write-off.
- Letting personal charges ride on the company card because no one approves expenses.
- Re-keying every receipt by hand into the accounting system instead of capturing it once.
- Reconstructing the month from memory and the supplier statement instead of capturing live.
Field checklist
Want this checklist to run itself on every job — with photo proof and a signed record crews can hand the customer? That's FieldOS.
Standards and references
The rules that govern expense records come from three places, and you should know which is which. The IRS sets the recordkeeping and deduction rules: what you can deduct, what you have to keep, and for how long. The federal general rule is three years for most records, six if income is understated by more than 25 percent, seven for bad-debt and worthless-security claims, four for employment tax, and longer for depreciable property. Those are the federal baselines. Verify the retention and the deduction treatment for your situation with your accountant, because the tax code changes and your state may differ.
The accounting practice, the PO, the three-way match, the supplier reconciliation, comes from standard accounts-payable controls, not from a code. It is how you keep from paying wrong prices and double bills, and your bookkeeper or controller sets how strict it runs.
Your own bookkeeping system, QuickBooks or whatever ledger you keep, defines the chart of accounts and the cost codes the expenses land in. On commercial work, the contract sets the billing rules: cost-plus terms, reimbursable markup caps, and the backup the owner requires, often AIA G702 and G703 with receipts behind every reimbursable line. Three habits carry all of it: capture at the counter, tie every expense to the job, and bill the reimbursable. Get those right and the records, the costs, and the deductions hold up. Confirm the tax specifics with your accountant and the billing specifics with the contract.
Units, terms, and definitions
Expense tracking carries its own vocabulary, and the same thing goes by different names across a supplier, an accountant, and a contract.
- PO (purchase order)
- A document authorizing a buy against a job, naming the items, the agreed price, and a tracking number
- Three-way match
- Checking the PO, the receiving record, and the invoice against each other before paying
- Reimbursable
- A job cost billed back to the customer, usually with a contract markup, as opposed to overhead the company absorbs
- Cost code
- The category within a job, such as rough-in, service, or trim, that an expense is tagged to
- Overhead
- Cost not billable to one job, recovered through the overhead rate rather than a customer invoice
- Cost-plus
- A contract paid as actual cost plus an agreed fee, where every billed cost needs backup
- OCR
- Optical character recognition, reading the amount and merchant off a receipt photo
- Standard mileage rate
- An IRS per-mile method for deducting vehicle use, as an alternative to actual expense
FAQ
How do you track job expenses in the field?
Capture every receipt at the counter by photographing it and tying it to the job and cost code on the spot, not at month end. Flag whether the cost is billable or overhead while you remember the work. A field app like FieldOS does this in a few taps, then feeds the coded expense to your books.
Why should you tie every expense to a job?
An expense not tied to a job floats, and the job cost comes out wrong. Tying each receipt to the job and cost code means the cost gets billed if it is billable, lands on the right job for costing, and is deducted with proof. Untagged, it defaults to overhead, so a billable cost becomes yours.
What is a three-way match?
A three-way match checks the purchase order, the receiving record, and the supplier invoice against each other before payment, so the price, quantity, and what arrived all agree. It catches wrong prices, double bills, and charges for material that backordered or never showed. Any mismatch gets held instead of paid.
How long do you keep business receipts?
The IRS general rule is at least three years from when you filed the return, but it stretches to six years if income is understated by more than 25 percent and seven for bad-debt claims. Depreciable property records run longer. Keep digital receipts indefinitely and confirm the periods with your accountant.
What markup do you put on reimbursable expenses?
Reimbursable material commonly carries around 10 to 15 percent markup to cover fronting the money, handling, and risk, but the contract sets the number and some specs cap it. On cost-plus work the markup is spelled out in the agreement. Flag the expense billable at capture so the markup gets applied automatically.
Company card or reimburse employees for job expenses?
A card per tech beats reimbursing personal cards, because the charge hits your account directly and you set per-card limits to bound the damage if a card is lost. Either way the rule is the same: no receipt, no charge accepted. The receipt coded to the job is what turns a card line into a job cost.
What happens if you lose a receipt?
A lost receipt costs three ways: an unbilled cost if it was billable, a wrong job margin that misprices the next bid, and a denied deduction with no proof at tax time. Check the supplier statement to recover the charge, and move capture to the counter so it stops happening in the first place.
Are fuel and mileage deductible for a contractor?
Yes, vehicle costs are deductible by the standard mileage rate or by actual expense, but both rest on records: the miles, the date, and the business purpose. No log, no deduction, the same as a missing receipt. Pick a method per vehicle and confirm the current rate and rules with your accountant.
How do you handle equipment rental costs on a job?
Capture the rental ticket to the job at pickup, flag it billable if the contract makes it billable, and set the expected return date. The rental is a job cost the moment it leaves the yard, and one left running past the work is margin walking out. Late returns are days you pay for and rarely bill.
Is a photo of a receipt good enough for taxes?
A clear digital image of a receipt is generally accepted, and it beats the paper because thermal receipts fade to blank within months. Photograph receipts at the counter, let OCR read the amount and merchant, and keep the image coded to the job. Confirm any specific documentation requirements with your accountant.