Hidden metadata in scanned receipts and invoices
Expense reports and vendor invoices move through a lot of hands — an employee, a manager, an accountant, sometimes a client. Most people only look at the numbers on the page. But the file carrying those numbers, whether it's a phone-scanned receipt or an emailed invoice PDF, can carry a quiet layer of information that never shows up on screen.
What actually rides along
A receipt photographed with a phone app picks up the same fields any photo does: device model, the exact time the photo was taken, and — if location services were on — GPS coordinates of wherever the purchase happened. If the receipt was scanned with a dedicated scanner or a multi-function printer, the file can instead carry the device's serial number and software version.
Invoices built as PDFs carry their own layer: the author name pulled from whoever's copy of the accounting software or Word template created it, the software that generated the file, and sometimes an edit history if the document was revised from an older template. None of this is fraud or malice — it's just what the tools leave behind by default. But it's still information about your internal systems and staff sitting in a file that leaves the building.
Why it's worth a second look
Expense files often get forwarded, archived, or handed to an outside accountant or auditor with little thought. A vendor's serial number in your receipts isn't a big deal. Your own device or employee identifiers baked into invoices you send to clients — or shared with a vendor who now knows more about your internal setup than intended — is a small but real leak. It adds up across hundreds of files a finance team touches in a year.
What scrub actually covers here
For a receipt that's a photo (JPEG/PNG), scrub removes EXIF, GPS, XMP and any appended data the same way it does for any picture — losslessly, on your device, no upload. For an invoice or receipt that's a PDF, scrub currently detects hidden fields — metadata, author/producer info, embedded text layers — and shows you exactly what's there. PDF cleaning isn't available yet, so treat PDF invoices as scan-and-check for now, not scan-and-clean.
If you need a receipt fully stripped today: photograph or scan it as an image, clean the image with scrub, and keep the PDF step for when write support lands.
The short version
Scanned receipts and invoices carry more than the numbers you see — device info, timestamps and author fields ride along quietly. Image receipts you can clean today; PDF invoices you can check today. Get scrub free and see what's actually in your next expense file.