Turn receipt PDFs into a completed cover sheet
Stephen Toback used Claude Cowork to pull receipt data from PDFs and assemble the paperwork he normally fills out manually.
- What they did
- Stephen Toback asked Cowork to read a purchasing-card receipt PDF, gather the relevant fields, and format them for his report paperwork. The agent ran a Python job inside its local Linux environment, ran into an error, then troubleshot it and produced the files anyway. He also tried the same workflow on a directory of PDFs.
- How it went
- The receipt-processing run finished and the generated files landed in the outputs folder. Afterward, Cowork stalled when its connection failed, and neither reopening the app nor rebooting the machine fixed it; clearing the app’s saved state was needed to get it working again.
- Tips
- For batch receipt work, this can save manual copying, but a lost connection can interrupt the run. Keep the output directory separate so completed files survive a crash.
Try it yourself with Claude Cowork
I have purchasing-card receipt PDFs in [folder path]. Read each file, capture the vendor, date, amount, and business purpose, and place the results into [cover sheet template or column list]. Process one PDF at a time and write each completed item to an outputs folder as you go. If a file cannot be read, flag it for me. Before any step that would send, submit, delete, or overwrite data, pause and ask for my approval.
Fill in the [brackets]. Agents can make mistakes, so review anything before it is sent, paid or deleted.
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