Expense season has a familiar ritual: a phone full of receipt photos, a finance portal that wants a PDF, and a deadline. The photos are HEIC, the portal does not accept HEIC, and converting them one by one into separate files is exactly the kind of chore that eats an evening. The fix is a small workflow change: treat the whole expense set as one document from the start.
Sort the receipts before you convert. A PDF's page order is the order you feed the files in, so sort first. Rename or reorder the photos in expense order — taxi, hotel, meals, in date order — before conversion. Reordering pages inside a PDF afterward is far more annoying than sorting files beforehand, and finance reviewers notice a jumbled report.
Check each photo is actually readable. Phone photos of receipts fail in predictable ways: a folded corner hiding the total, glare from overhead lights, a shadow across the amount. Open each photo and check the total, date, and vendor are legible before converting. A PDF of unreadable receipts is worse than no PDF at all, because it looks complete while it is not.
Convert the set into one multi-page PDF. Instead of converting each receipt into its own file and then merging, convert the whole set in one pass into a single multi-page PDF. Each photo becomes one page, in the order you set. You can do this with a heic to pdf converter that runs in the browser: the photos are processed locally on your device and never uploaded, which is exactly what you want for receipts that show card numbers, addresses, and spending details.
Check the PDF like a reviewer would. Before submitting, open the finished PDF and flip through every page: is each receipt upright, is the total visible, is anything cut off at the page edge? Portals often cap uploads at 10–25 MB, so check the file size too — if it is too large, convert at a slightly smaller page size from the original photos rather than re-compressing the finished PDF.
Keep the originals. File the original HEIC photos in an archive folder after submitting. If finance asks for a single receipt again, or a different format, you want to work from the originals rather than extracting a page from a PDF. The PDF is the submission copy; the photos are the record.
Disclosure: I'm the developer of FileOnTap. The "sort first, check legibility, keep the originals" order is the real takeaway whichever tool you use.
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