Receipt Scanner

How it works

1. 1

   Snap a receipt with your camera, or upload a photo.

2. 2

   We read the amount, store and date — you check and correct anything.

3. 3

   Save it and the expense lands in your Budget Tracker. The photo is deleted right away.

Frequently asked questions

Last improved

Changes to this tool specifically, not the site.

1. Improved19 Sept 2026

   The receipt scanner now uses the whole screen, and finds the receipt for you

   Photographing a receipt happened in a small box inside the page — about a third of a phone screen, with the privacy notice above it and two buttons below. A receipt is the one document shaped so that you need the height. It now opens the same full-screen scanner as Scan to PDF: it finds the edges of the receipt while you hold the camera, draws them in green, and straightens and cuts out the receipt when it takes the shot, so what goes to the reader is the receipt rather than the receipt and your table. It opens filling the screen rather than fitting the camera’s whole frame inside it — most phone cameras hand over a landscape picture whatever the phone is doing, and fitting that into a tall screen left a horizontal band across the middle with black above and below, which is no use at all for something as tall as a receipt. It knows to expect a long thin shape, so a till roll no longer fails the checks written for a sheet of paper. And it captures on its own once the picture is steady. And it says what it is doing in the middle of the screen, where you are actually looking — "Receipt found — hold still", then "Captured" — instead of only in a small line under your thumb.

2. Fixed29 Aug 2026

   The receipt scanner now reads receipts that are sideways, and stops guessing the amount

   The receipt scanner was getting real receipts wrong, and there were three separate reasons. It now rotates the photo the right way up before reading it — a till roll is long and thin so people photograph it sideways, and reading a sideways receipt does not produce a worse answer, it produces noise, which is why a Walmart receipt came back with a store name of "Aeqg AJeAFq 1SnN4" and no amount at all. The amount is worked out properly now instead of being guessed: it looks for the line that says total, ignores the card-machine block at the bottom that says TOTAL PURCHASE once per tender, and where the receipt prints a subtotal and a tax line it checks that the total actually adds up. If it still cannot tell, it leaves the box empty rather than filling it in, because a wrong number gets saved to your budget while an empty one gets typed in correctly. It used to fall back to the largest number anywhere on the receipt, which is usually the phone number. Two buttons were broken too: Use camera opened the camera but showed you a black rectangle, and Upload photo opened the camera as well, so there was no way to pick a receipt already saved on your phone. Both work now.

3. Fixed27 Aug 2026

   The camera tools opened as a big black rectangle

   Receipt scanner and Scan to PDF both greeted you with an empty black box most of the screen tall, with one line of text floating in the middle of it. The camera viewfinder was being drawn at full size whether or not the camera was actually running — so before you had granted permission to anything, the page was mostly a black void. Now you get a normal, compact panel until the camera is on, and the viewfinder itself no longer tries to fill a widescreen monitor when it starts.

Everything we’ve changed →