Operations & admin · Claude Cowork

Turn receipt PDFs into a cover sheet for your expense report

Idea + starter prompt, not run by us yet

For: Staff who fill in expense cover sheets from receipts by hand

A Duke staff member pointed Cowork at a purchase card receipt PDF and asked for the data plus a report cover sheet. Cowork ran a script, hit an error, fixed it and wrote the output files. It also handled a folder of PDFs. Later it hung when the internet dropped and needed its app data cleared.

Steps

1. Copy the receipts into a test folder.
2. Paste the starter prompt and check the first cover sheet against the receipt.
3. Use a steady internet connection, since a drop in the middle of a task froze it.
4. Skip it for urgent deadlines. Output files survive a crash, so check the outputs folder.

Starter prompt

This folder has receipt PDFs from my [card or account type] for [month].

For each receipt, pull the date, vendor, amount and what was bought. Then fill a cover sheet using this layout: [describe fields or attach template].

Process one receipt first and show me the result. After I approve, do the rest and save files to [outputs folder]. Mark any receipt you could not read clearly. Do not submit anything.

Original post: sites.duke.edu · found via agentusecases.ai. Written up in our own words. We haven't run it, so test it on made-up data first.