Create upload URL

POST https://api.light.inc/v1/expenses/upload-url

Creates a pre-signed URL for uploading an expense receipt document

Authorization

Send one of these on every request. See Authentication for how to get credentials.

API key
Basic authentication header of the form Basic <api_key>, where <api_key> is your api key.
Bearer token

Request body

application/json;charset=UTF-8

filename stringrequired
Name of the file being uploaded; kept as the receipt's file name
contentType stringrequired
MIME type of the file: application/pdf, image/jpeg, image/png, image/heic, image/heif or image/tiff
shouldAutoCreateExpense boolean
When true (default), the uploaded receipt is converted to PDF, an expense is created automatically and its fields are extracted by OCR. When false, the receipt is only stored: no expense is created and nothing is parsed; the caller creates the expense itself from the returned key.

Response

uploadUrl string · url
key string
metadata object

curl -X POST "https://api.light.inc/v1/expenses/upload-url" \
  -H "Authorization: Basic YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
  "filename": "string",
  "contentType": "string",
  "shouldAutoCreateExpense": true
}'

const res = await fetch("https://api.light.inc/v1/expenses/upload-url", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    Authorization: `Basic ${process.env.LIGHT_API_KEY}`,
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    "filename": "string",
    "contentType": "string",
    "shouldAutoCreateExpense": true
  }),
});
const data = await res.json();

import os, requests

res = requests.post(
    "https://api.light.inc/v1/expenses/upload-url",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Basic {os.environ['LIGHT_API_KEY']}"},
    json={
        "filename": "string",
        "contentType": "string",
        "shouldAutoCreateExpense": True
    },
)
data = res.json()

Example response

{
  "uploadUrl": "https://example.com",
  "key": "string",
  "metadata": null
}

Generated from the schema — shapes and types are real, values are placeholders.