Snap a receipt with your phone

On your phone, capture a receipt the moment you get it:

1. Tap the center ⦿ Do button in the bottom bar, then Scan receipt.
2. Take the photo. TALISK_HQ reads it in the background and moves you to a confirm screen.
3. Choose How was this paid?. The list holds your own bank and card accounts, plus I paid personally and Not sure yet. Check the vendor, total, and tax, then tap Check & approve.

Cash or a personal card settles the receipt straight away. A business bank or card waits to match your bank feed, so pick the account it was paid from if you know it.

Picking a Category opens your chart of accounts, grouped, showing each account number. Search it by number or by name: typing 62 finds 6200 just as typing meals does. A business that has not set up its own chart sees the standard category names instead.

Tap the small photo beside those fields to open the receipt full screen, where you can pinch to zoom in and double-tap to zoom back out. The figures on that screen are TALISK_HQ's reading of the photo, so this is how you check them against the paper before you approve.

That records the expense and adds it to your books; you'll see Approved — added to your expenses. Cash or a personal card settles it right away; a business bank or card waits to match the bank line.

Changed your mind before approving? Discard and start over throws the scan away for good: the photo and everything TALISK_HQ read off it are deleted, and the receipt stops appearing in Recent scans on the Money screen. Once you have approved it there is nothing to discard here, because it is a bill now; remove it from Bills and receipts instead.

A scan you never saved

A scan becomes a receipt when you save it on the confirm screen. If you leave one, it waits in Recent scans on the Money screen. Six hours after you took it, TALISK_HQ files it into Bills and receipts for you, using what it read off the photo, the same way an uploaded PDF arrives.

Nothing is approved: open it, check it against its photo, fix anything TALISK_HQ misread, then approve it. A scan TALISK_HQ could not read a vendor, a total or a whole date from stays on your phone for you to save there.

Some receipts print the date as numbers only, like 05/06/2026, which reads as 5 June in most of the world and 5 May in the United States. TALISK_HQ works it out from the receipt itself. A short note under the date says what the receipt printed whenever the answer is not certain, either because nothing on the receipt settles the question or because TALISK_HQ's own reading disagrees with the evidence it found. Check the date it filled in against that note and correct it if it is the wrong way round.

If the date falls in a locked period, TALISK_HQ cannot finish the posting. The receipt is still saved: the screen says Saved — not approved yet and tells you it is stored and nothing was lost. Open Bills and receipts to finish it when the period is open again.

While the photo is still uploading the screen says Uploading receipt… keep this open. Once TALISK_HQ has it, that changes to Reading receipt… you can leave this page, and from then on you can switch away or lock your phone without losing anything. Wait for the wording to change before you put the phone down.

With no signal, snap it anyway: the photo is saved on your phone and goes up on its own when you are back online. This needs the phone to have opened your books with signal at least once since you signed in or last switched accounts; until then the scanner says it cannot save the photo offline.

If someone signs in to a different account, or signs out, in another tab on the same device, the app reloads to follow. If it cannot, the top of the screen says you are signed in as someone else, or signed out, in another tab and offers Reload. Until you reload, nothing you capture on that page is saved, online or offline, and the scanner says so.

A photo waiting to go up is yours alone. It goes up only while you are signed in, and nobody else who signs in on the phone sees it or sends it. Someone else's waiting photos are never shown to you; they are only counted, in the question TALISK_HQ asks before you sign out. What clears waiting photos:

• Signing out deletes every photo waiting on the phone, yours and anyone else's. TALISK_HQ asks first and says how many, so let yours go up before you sign out.
• A session timing out clears nothing, yours or anyone else's: each waiting photo waits for the person who took it to sign back in.
• A photo that has waited 30 days without going up is deleted from the phone, and the strip at the top says so the next time you open the app.

The scanner shows which books a photo is saving to, under the shutter. A photo is saved only when three things agree: the account the top of the screen shows you are in, the account TALISK_HQ's server last said you were in, and the books the screen named, by name. If any of them disagree, for example because you switched accounts on another tab or device, or a switch did not finish on a weak signal, the photo is not saved, online or offline. The screen says its books are out of date and offers Reload. The same check runs again when you tap Check & approve: the receipt is saved and approved only in the books the photo went up to, and only while this screen still names them.

Sometimes the screen says This session is working in another account's books. instead. That means TALISK_HQ's server is still inside a client's books, or another owner's books you keep as their bookkeeper, while the phone shows your own: usually a switch into those books finished on the server but the answer never reached the phone. Reloading cannot fix that, so the screen links to More, where Leave those books takes this session back to your own books and reloads. Nothing is saved until you do, and the phone never moves you into those books on its own.

A waiting photo belongs to the books the screen named when you took it. It goes up into those books, even if you switch books before it is sent. The phone remembers the server's last answer, for you only, so it still knows after the app reloads with no signal. Signing out or switching accounts clears it. If the phone has no answer from the server about which account and books you are in, the photo is not saved; the scanner says so.

If you work in other people's books as their bookkeeper or partner, a photo taken in a client's books goes up only while you are in that client's books. The others wait, untouched, until you are back in the account they were taken in, and the strip at the top of the app counts them as waiting. Before saving a waiting photo, TALISK_HQ checks that you are signed in to the account it was taken in and that the books it names belong to that account. If you are not, it waits. If those books are not in that account at all, the strip says so and offers Discard. The same check runs when you are online: if TALISK_HQ finds this session is now in other books, the photo is kept on the phone and waits the same way; if the books are gone, the scanner says it was not saved.

Hours and mileage waiting to go up follow the same rules. The running timer is different: the phone has one timer slot, so starting a timer replaces any other on that phone, whoever started it.

A photo that was already waiting before TALISK_HQ began recording who took each one (September 2026) carries no name. It goes up as yours only once TALISK_HQ has checked with the server that the phone opened already signed in to your account, and nobody has signed in since. Otherwise it is cleared, because TALISK_HQ cannot tell whose it is.

If an upload cannot be completed, a strip appears at the top of the app saying so, with Try again when another attempt might work and Discard to clear it. If the photo itself is no longer on your phone the strip says so and offers Take it again, because there is nothing left to retry. Tapping that takes you to the camera and clears the strip, since taking the photo again is the whole of the fix. While you stay signed in, TALISK_HQ never drops a capture without telling you. Waiting photos are cleared only in the cases above: a sign-out (TALISK_HQ asks first), a photo that waited 30 days (the strip says so), and the unnamed photos from before September 2026.

To see where a scan ended up, open Money, then Bills and receipts. Every scan you approve, and anything TALISK_HQ picked up from your email, is in that list.

The Recent scans strip on Money holds your latest scans, and every card in it opens. A Ready scan opens the confirm screen. One still Scanning shows its photo until TALISK_HQ has read it, then moves on to the confirm screen by itself. A Saved scan opens the bill it became, with the figures you approved, and closing it brings you back to Money. A card marked Failed is a photo TALISK_HQ could not read: open it to see the photo and the reason, then tap Take another photo to try again or Discard this scan to remove it. Either one clears the card from the strip.

When you pick a Job on the confirm screen, a Markup % box appears with that job's markup filled in. It is added on top of the receipt's cost when you invoice the job; change it, or set it to 0 to bill the receipt at cost.

If you opened the scanner from a job, the link at the bottom of the done screen takes you back to that job rather than to Money.