General information, not professional advice. GST rules, rates and due dates change by notification. Check the current position on the GST Portal or with your CA before you act on anything here.
The short version
- A purchase bill is worth its GST as input tax credit and its value as an expense. A bill nobody enters loses both.
- Photograph it and the app reads the items, quantities, rates, GST and totals into a card you check.
- Where the bill carries an e-invoice QR code, the app reads the code rather than trusting the printed text.
- Nothing is booked until you confirm. Confirming moves stock, the supplier balance, the expense and the tax together.
- The image stays attached to the entry, which is what makes the record produceable later.
Why the photo is worth taking
A supplier's tax invoice does two jobs at once. It is the document your input tax credit is claimed on, and it is the evidence for the purchase in your books. Lose it and you lose both, and neither comes back by remembering the amount.
On a ₹1,18,000 purchase at 18 per cent, that is ₹18,000 of credit and ₹1,00,000 of cost. Thermal paper also fades, so a bill filed in a drawer in April can be unreadable by the time anyone asks for it. Photographing it as it arrives solves the fading problem and the pile problem in one motion.
What the app reads
From the photo, it extracts the supplier, the invoice number and date, the line items with their quantities and rates, the GST split, and the totals. It matches items against your own catalogue where it can, so a bill for something you already stock lands against the product you already have rather than creating a duplicate.
Camera photos, not scans, are what this is built for. Bills arrive creased, at an angle, in bad light, half in shadow, because that is how a shop works.
The e-invoice QR code
Where the bill carries an e-invoice QR code, the app reads the code rather than the printed text. This matters more than it looks: the QR carries the signed invoice details from the portal, so it is the supplier's own attested version of what the bill says, not an interpretation of ink.
It also matters for the credit. Input tax credit requires a valid supplier GSTIN, and a GSTIN misread by one character is a claim against nobody. Reading the code where one exists removes that class of error entirely.
The card, and the gate
Extraction produces a card, not an entry. You see the supplier, the items, the tax and the total, and you confirm or you edit. The same rule runs here as everywhere else in the app: nothing reaches your books until a person says yes.
This is deliberate and it is the opposite of how “automatic” bookkeeping usually gets sold. An extraction that books silently is an extraction whose mistakes you find at year end. An extraction that asks is one whose mistakes you find while the supplier is still standing there.
What confirming books
| Where | What moves |
|---|---|
| The journal | A balanced purchase voucher |
| Stock | Quantities in, at the cost on the bill |
| The supplier | What you now owe them, or what you paid |
| Tax | The GST recorded against the supplier's GSTIN, which is what the credit rests on |
| The entry itself | The bill image, attached, so the record can be produced later |
Month end
At month end the purchase register comes out supplier-wise with GSTIN, invoice number and date, taxable value, the tax split and HSN. That is the file a GSTR-2B reconciliation runs on, which is why your CA asks for a register rather than a folder of photographs.
When it cannot read the bill
Sometimes it cannot, and it says so rather than guessing. A bill photographed in the dark, a carbon copy that has given up, a handwritten challan with no printed total: these come back as a card with gaps for you to fill, not as an entry with invented numbers in it.
That is the right failure. A scanner that silently produces a plausible wrong number costs more than one that admits it could not read the third line.
Photograph one bill and see
Take the next supplier bill that arrives, photograph it, and look at the card before you confirm. Manual entry and viewing your books never cost tokens.
Frequently asked questions
Does it work on a photo taken with a phone?
Yes, and that is the normal case. Bills are photographed on a counter, creased and at an angle, and the extraction is built for that rather than for flatbed scans.
What happens if the extraction gets a number wrong?
You see it on the confirmation card before anything is booked, and you edit it there. Nothing is written until you confirm, so an extraction error is a quick correction on the card rather than a wrong entry to find later.
Does it read e-invoice QR codes?
Where the bill has one, yes, and it uses the code in preference to the printed text. The QR carries the supplier's signed invoice details, so it is more reliable than reading ink, particularly for the GSTIN that the input tax credit depends on.
Is the bill image kept?
Yes, attached to the entry it created. GST records are to be kept for 72 months from the due date of that year's annual return, and a faded thermal bill cannot be produced, so the image is the record that survives.
Can I still enter a purchase by hand?
Yes, and manual entry never costs tokens. Photographing is a shortcut, not the only route.