A parking stub and a toll slip are the smallest, dullest receipts a freelancer or small business ever collects — a few square centimetres of thermal paper with a time, a lot number, and an amount, and not much else. They're easy to lose, easy to skip, and easy to assume aren't worth the trouble. They are worth the trouble: for anyone who drives for work, parking and tolls add up to a real, defensible deduction that — in the US at least — sits on top of your mileage, not inside it. The problem is that they're also among the hardest everyday slips for receipt OCR to make sense of, and increasingly there's no slip at all. Here's how to handle both cases.
The slip that's mostly blank
Most receipts give OCR something to work with: a store name across the top, a list of items, a clear total. A parking stub gives it almost nothing. What you typically get is a time in, a time out, a lot or gate number, and an amount — often with no real merchant name, or a name like "PARK-A-LOT #4471" that means nothing to anyone but the operator. OCR on Starlog pre-fills the store name and the amount from the image; on a parking slip, the amount is usually the one thing it can read cleanly, while the "store" it drafts might be a lot code you'll want to rename to something you'll recognise in December, like "Airport parking — client trip."
Toll slips are worse. A booth receipt is often just a denomination and a plaza name printed in low-contrast dot-matrix on paper the size of a bus ticket. There's no line-item detail because there's nothing to itemise — it's one charge. So the honest workflow here is the same one that applies to every receipt, just more so: let OCR draft the amount, confirm it against what you actually paid, and set the date and category yourself. On these slips, you're the one who supplies the context, because the paper barely carries any.
And these are thermal receipts at their most fragile — small enough to live loose in a cup holder, printed in the faintest ink of any receipt you'll handle. If you've read what happens to faded thermal receipts, you know the fix: capture them while they're still legible, not months later when the stub in the door pocket has gone blank.
When there's no paper at all (US and India)
Here's the twist that makes parking and tolls genuinely different from a restaurant bill: more and more, the transaction never produces a receipt at all.
- Tolls have largely gone electronic. In the US, E-ZPass and toll-by-plate systems debit your account or mail a monthly invoice — there's no booth, no slip. In India, FASTag deducts the toll straight from a linked wallet and sends an SMS; the plaza hands you nothing. In both cases the real record isn't paper — it's a statement line or an email.
- Parking is following. App-based parking (pay by phone at the meter) sends a confirmation email or an in-app receipt instead of a printed stub. The nice thing is that these are digital from birth.
When the "receipt" is an email or a PDF statement, the workflow shifts from photographing paper to importing a file. Starlog captures PDFs and images through the same picker it uses for the camera, so an emailed parking confirmation or a toll invoice files right next to the paper stubs — that's the same path the PDF and emailed-receipt post walks through in detail. For a monthly toll statement that bundles a dozen crossings into one document, keep the statement as the evidence and record the crossings the way your accountant wants them — usually as one monthly line, but confirm with your CA or CPA if you need per-trip detail.
The one thing not to do is assume the bank feed will remember for you. A card-statement line that reads "TOLLAUTH 6.50" nine months later is a mystery charge, not a documented business expense. The statement proves money moved; it doesn't prove what for.
Why these tiny slips punch above their weight
It's tempting to bin a ₹80 toll or a $6 parking stub as not worth logging. Two reasons not to:
- They're separate from mileage (US). This is the one people miss. The IRS standard mileage rate covers the cost of operating the vehicle — fuel, wear, insurance — but parking fees and tolls incurred for business are deductible on top of the mileage deduction. Skip the stubs and you're leaving a real number on the table. (Here's how the mileage rate itself works, and mileage vs. actual expenses if you're choosing a method — confirm the current treatment with your CPA.)
- They evidence the trip (US and India). A parking receipt from a client's city, dated the day of the meeting, is quiet corroboration that the trip happened. Grouped with the fuel receipt and the mileage log for the same journey, it turns a claim into a documented one. In India, where business-travel expenses need supporting proof, that FASTag statement plus the parking slip is exactly the paper trail that holds up — as always, confirm the specifics with your CA.
Capture it before it's a mystery charge
Everything above gets easier if you capture at the moment, which for parking and tolls means: the stub, when the barcode still scans and you remember where you were going. Snap it, let OCR draft the amount, set the category to Travel and the date to the day of the trip, and — the part that matters most for a slip this anonymous — add a one-line note about the trip while you still remember it. "Parking, downtown, Q3 client pitch" is the difference between a deduction and a shrug. (You can watch exactly what OCR reads and what it leaves to you on a single slip with the free browser scanner.)
Then it stops being loose paper. It files into your own Google Drive with every other receipt, and if you group it by trip or project it lands inside "the Delhi client visit" alongside the fuel, the meals, and the hotel — the whole journey in one place instead of a scatter of tiny charges. Come tax season it's already in the export your accountant can use, categorised, with the image behind the number.
The takeaway
Parking and toll receipts are the smallest slips you'll scan and, weirdly, some of the most valuable — a deduction that stacks on top of your mileage in the US and corroborates the whole trip everywhere. They're hard for OCR because they're nearly blank and printed in disappearing ink, and half the time there's no paper at all, just an SMS or a statement line. So lean on OCR for the amount, supply the context the slip can't carry, and capture the thing — paper or PDF — the moment it happens. Do that and the least glamorous receipt in your pocket becomes one clean, defensible line instead of an unexplained charge you can't claim.