First, a disclaimer: I know almost nothing about iPhones. I'm an Android guy, and the last Apple product I used was an Apple II sometime around the late Cretaceous period. It may have had a camera, but only if you connected one with an alligator clip and wrote the driver yourself in BASIC. Fortunately, if you build this as a web app, the type of phone shouldn't matter. An iPhone, Android phone, tablet, or sufficiently ambitious refrigerator should all be able to use it through a browser.

You have several possible approaches, but I would probably build a small mobile-friendly web form. The iPhone wouldn't need a special app. A normal HTML file-upload control can let the user take a new picture with the phone's camera or select an existing picture. Just like you could technically do with the forums here on my website to upload an image. I do it all the time from my phone.

The user would enter the date, vendor, amount, category, and other expense information, take a picture of the receipt, and submit the form. The web server would save the image as a file and add the expense record to a SQL Server table. Your Access database could then use linked SQL Server tables to work with those records. That's almost exactly how my website works, except I do it in two stages. I have you enter in the forum post first, and then you can add the images as a second step because I'm too lazy to merge it all together, but you could.

I generally wouldn't store the actual receipt images inside the database - whether it's Access or SQL Server. I would store each image in a folder or cloud-storage location and save only its filename or URL in the expense record. This keeps the database from becoming enormous and makes the images easier to manage.

Power Apps is another good option because it already has controls for taking and uploading pictures and can connect to SQL Server, SharePoint, Dataverse, and other services. It may be faster if you want a low-code solution, but it introduces Power Apps licensing and another development platform to learn. I've done videos that talk about this.

For this project, my recommended learning path would be a SQL Server back end, an Access desktop front end, and a small responsive web form for mobile expense entry and receipt uploads. That's also an excellent idea for a future class because the same design could be used for inventory photos, property inspections, service calls, deliveries, and many other applications. Get the text part down first then light a fire under my butt about the image upload part.

Thank you Richard! Appreciate the feedback.

Yes definitely save images in a folder (already thinking about the save file name date.autonum.vendor name.jpg to keep it unique file names). I’ll be working on the access side of things. Learning from your videos write things down and draw out the form.

I have SQL server on my learning list of things. I’ll be adding webpage creation to it.

Thank you