israeli-receipt-scanner

Use a vision-capable model to read the receipt image, since Israeli receipts mix right-to-left Hebrew with left-to-right numbers. The skill extracts merchant, osek number, date, line items, VAT, and total, then outputs structured JSON or CSV.

Tesseract with the heb traineddata model supports Hebrew OCR, while EasyOCR has no Hebrew model and is not usable. For best results on thermal receipts, vision LLMs such as Claude Sonnet vision, GPT-4o, or Gemini are recommended over traditional OCR.

Input VAT is deductible only on an original tax invoice (חשבונית מס) from an osek murshe, issued in the buyer's name matching the business's osek number, with an allocation number when above the date-based threshold. Plain receipts, proforma invoices, osek patur documents, and foreign receipts are not deductible.

Foreign-vendor receipts are not Israeli tax invoices and carry no deductible Israeli input VAT. The skill auto-tags them as foreign-vendor, sets vat_deductible to false, and surfaces the reverse-charge self-reporting requirement instead of treating them as standard SaaS expenses.

Thermal paper degrades quickly in heat, and small dense Hebrew characters lose OCR quality first. Request a higher-resolution image (at least 300 DPI), improve lighting and contrast, and mark unreadable fields as null with a warning rather than guessing.

It does not handle non-Israeli receipt formats, handwritten notes without printed text, or bank statement reconciliation. It also does not file VAT returns or validate allocation numbers against the live SHAAM service; it only reads the printed number.