PDF to Image, or How I Stopped Hating Concur and Started Loving Shortcuts

One of the worst parts of traveling for work is using Concur for expense report submission.¹ The entire system is obtuse and slow. But the worst part is that receipts are not accepted as PDFs. They must be images. While this is insane to me, there’s no arguing with a monolith. So I made an iOS shortcut.

This is a dead simple shortcut. I select a PDF with the document picker. It then converts the PDF to images and stitches them together vertically. Finally, it saves the image to the photo library.

Here’s a companion shortcut that works with PDFs through the iOS share sheet:

I think stuff like this is the sweet spot for Shortcuts. Every time I build something that is more than about 15 actions, I regret it or end up not using it. These tiny point-solutions are a fantastic way to get more value from iOS and fill some of the basic gaps in the system.

Concur is still terrible but at least now I can spend slightly less time using it.

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1. Hahaha. Just kidding. The worst part is everything about traveling for work. ↩︎