Capture receipts by photo or email

A kirana store owner keeps a drawer full of supplier bills, some in cash-memo carbon copy, some scribbled on a notepad, and a handful photographed on WhatsApp and never looked at again. By the time the accountant asks for last quarter's purchase bills, half are missing, faded, or torn at the fold where a rubber band held the drawer together.

Receipt and invoice capture gives every bill a permanent home the moment it exists. Photograph it on a phone, forward the supplier's email to a dedicated Khata address, or drag a stack of PDFs in at once, and the original file stays attached to whatever gets extracted from it. Nothing here decides what a bill means for tax purposes — it simply makes sure the bill itself is never the thing that goes missing, so the person who does make that call has something real in front of them.

Capture is intentionally the least judgement-heavy part of preparing books, and that's the point. Khata stores and organises source documents; it never decides which of them represent a deductible expense or a GST-eligible purchase. A shopkeeper photographing a bill for gas cylinders and one for a personal phone recharge get treated identically at capture — both are stored, both keep their original attached — because that classification is exactly the judgement a CA is trained to make, not something an ingestion pipeline should be guessing at silently on the owner's behalf.

The practical risk at this stage is duplication and access, not misclassification. A busy kirana owner photographing the same crumpled bill twice, once in the morning rush and again that evening after forgetting the first attempt, would otherwise see that expense counted twice further downstream — the duplicate-detection check exists specifically to catch this before it compounds into the books. Bills also carry vendor names and sometimes personal details, so access to captured documents is scoped to the business and the people the owner has actually invited in, not broadly visible to anyone by default.

What capture buys the CA is simple: a period's worth of bills arriving as a searchable, attached record instead of a bag handed over at filing time. The CA still decides what each bill means for the books and the return — Khata's job ends at making sure the bill they need is there, legible, and linked to whatever was extracted from it, whenever they go looking.