The difference between an accountant who's cheap to work with and one who quietly bills you for an extra hour usually isn't the accountant — it's what you hand them. A folder of 200 unsorted photos is work. A spreadsheet that ties to a stack of named images is a review. Starlog's export is built to produce the second thing. Here's exactly what it gives you and how to hand it over.
The one-tap export
There are two ways to get the export:
- Everything for a period: go to Reports → Export.
- A single report: open any report and tap Share.
Either way you get one file: a ZIP. No assembling, no zipping folders by hand.
What's actually in the ZIP
Two things, and they're designed to be used together:
- An XLSX spreadsheet — your expenses as rows: merchant, amount, date, category. This is the part an accountant can actually work with: filter it, total it, tie it to your bank statement.
- Every receipt image — the original photos, so each line in the spreadsheet has its source document right there to back it up.
That pairing is the whole point. The spreadsheet answers "what did you spend?"; the images answer "prove it" — which is exactly the question an audit, or a careful accountant, asks.
Why this beats a folder of photos
Plenty of "receipt apps" hand your accountant a pile of images and call it done. The problem is that images aren't numbers. Someone still has to open each one, read the total, type it into a sheet, and categorise it — and that someone is either you at 11pm or your accountant on the clock. A reconcilable spreadsheet that ties to your bank statement is the artefact that saves real money, because it turns data entry into a review. (If you're still at the literal shoebox stage, here's the workflow to get out of it.)
In India: Tally, not just a spreadsheet
If your accountant works in Tally, the generic spreadsheet is fine but not ideal — the sharper version is to feed Tally without anyone retyping. We've covered that end to end: getting expenses into Tally without retyping, and why Tally-ready vouchers beat CSV cleanup. Same principle, less manual entry on the other side.
How to hand it over
A few small things make the handoff frictionless:
- Export by period that matches their ask. If they want Q1, export Q1 — don't send the whole year and make them filter it.
- Keep businesses separate. If you run more than one, export each on its own so nothing has to be untangled later. (Running multiple sets of books is its own discipline.)
- Send the ZIP as-is. The spreadsheet references the images; keeping them in one ZIP keeps that link intact.
The takeaway
The export exists so that "I have my receipts" becomes "here's a clean, reconcilable record" in one tap — a spreadsheet your accountant can work from, with every original image attached as proof. That's the version that keeps your bill down and your records audit-ready, today and three years from now.