8 Best Receipt Scanner Apps/Tools to Keep Track of Expenses

Whether you’re striving to manage your business’s finances, you must be aware of where your money is going. As a result, having a receipt scanner is the best thing one could opt for.

Receipts from whatever commodities or products you acquire from stores are prone to becoming misplaced, whether in an ocean of documents or a jumble of papers. On the other hand, physical papers are more likely to be damaged or destroyed.

Switching your printed receipts and papers into digital files might solve these issues, and a receipt scanner is an ideal tool for the task. Some receipt scanners offer internet services enabling you to organize and retrieve your receipts from anywhere.

This article will discuss what you need to know about receipt scanners. So, without further ado, let us begin.

What are Receipt Scanner Apps?

Receipt scanner apps let you take pictures of your physical receipts and turn them into digital copies that you can easily get from shared cloud storage. Before we go any further, let’s learn what a receipt scanner does.

A receipt scanner app is a smartphone application that enables your staff to capture receipts using their cell phones. To save paperwork, businesses have begun using receipt scanners for business costs coupled with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software.

Is your Business in need of Receipt Scanning Software?

You must examine the value of reading receipts for your company. The most obvious way to decide whether your business should have a receipt scanner app is to look at how frequently and complex your organization’s reimbursement system is.

Examine past data on business expenditures and employee engagement. Ask your employees whether they feel it will assist them.

Most importantly, speak with the finance staff since they are the ones that deal with reimbursements and expense-related issues daily. The receipt scanner app may benefit all corporate personnel by lowering the quantity of manual documentation needed in reimbursement and cost data management.

Advantages of Using a Receipt Scanning App

The old technique of paying reimbursement takes time for both employees and your financial staff. The procedure is also vulnerable to several blunders. It will be challenging for employees to get reimbursement for their expenses if they lose their receipts.

This is where using a receipt scanning app may help you. It enables your staff to submit their receipts quickly in digital format. The optical character recognition algorithms in the app eliminate human errors that may occur when directly inputting data from receipts.

A receipt scanner for your business may also assist your finance department. With digital receipts, they won’t have to hound employees to submit receipt claims.

Receipt scanners are available in various configurations, ranging from physical (computer and mobile scanners) to digital (e.g., apps and online software). However, because this tool is an investment, you should learn the essential aspects that the finest ones offer before purchasing one.

Here’s a list of the key features to look for in a receipt scanner. You may not require all of them, but follow this advice to choose the best one for you.

Features of a Receipt Scanner

It is well-known that every corporation has unique requirements for tracking business receipts. When choosing an app, make sure it suits your company’s needs. With many alternatives available on the market today, it might be challenging to choose.

Here’s a brief rundown of the critical things to consider when choosing a receipt management app.

Adaptability

You may require a portable receipt scanner when you need to monitor expenditure reports and receipts for workers or contractors. This could take the form of a portable scanner.

The scanner’s size is also significant for portability. Opt for a gadget that is lightweight and tiny enough to fit comfortably into a briefcase or bag.

Online Availability

A receipt scanner that can be made available online, like mobility, is handy. You’ll be able to link with accounting software very quickly, accelerating your process. As a result, you’ll be able to retrieve your receipts anytime and from any location.

Storage Space and Security

Whether you select physical or digital cloud storage, you should consider the limitations of your receipt scanner. Would you be scanning receipts on a daily or weekly basis? Will you only use it in rare instances, or will you use it all year? This might help you figure out how much storage you’ll need for your receipt scanner software or on an external drive.

Do not overlook the safety of the storage facility you select. You’ll want to ensure that all receipts and papers are safeguarded by more than one level of protection.

Traditional receipts and documents may be physically damaged or destroyed, but digital records might end up in the wrong hands if appropriate security precautions are not adopted.

Speed

One of the most unpleasant chores a business can undertake is scanning receipts for expenditure statements. Typically, people like to finish this chore as soon as possible, and a lightning-fast receipt scanner may assist. Some scanners may capture a picture of your documents in as little as 7.5 seconds. This is useful for scanning many receipts at once.

File Formats

Your receipts might be formatted in a specific format based on what you’re using them for. A tax accountant may demand that you scan or upload all of your receipts as PDFs, but your work expense program only accepts JPEG photos. Check to see what file formats your receipt scanner accepts, so you do not have to change them after scanning them manually.

Exportability

Lastly, ensure that your scanner covers your whole routine after scanning your receipts. Will you be keeping them on the cloud? Will you be sending them to someone else? Your receipt scanner must be capable of effortlessly transferring scanned papers.

Look out for the best receipt scanner apps on the marketplace now that you know the essential functions of a receipt scanner. Here we go with the list of the best ones.

Neat Receipts

Neat Receipts is an intelligent organization tool and portable scanner. You can scan receipts, contact cards, and paperwork on the go using the Neat Receipts mobile scanner, as the software detects, retrieves and organizes pertinent data.

Features

• The NeatReceipts portable scanner is lightweight and compact enough to slip into a briefcase, backpack, or carry-on. It also does not require AC power. Connect it through USB to your computer, and you’re ready to go.
• Your computer can power it via USB.
• Neat scans and extracts data from everything you scan, resulting in digital resources.
• With receipt data, you can create tax or expenditure reports, export to Excel, or sync contacts using Outlook or Address Book more quickly.
• It offers a free 30-day trial of NeatCloud, which allows you to sync and backup the Neat files and view them from any browser or mobile device.

Moreover, for as long as you are a NeatCloud subscriber, you will receive NeatCare, which provides additional assistance and accidental damage insurance for your NeatDesk.

Dext

Dext prepares and gathers your documentation with 99% precision, then processes it immediately into your accounting software. It allows you to invest more time in activities that produce value.

Features

• Dext Prepare is a delightfully straightforward solution for organizing and digitizing all of your documents.
• Submit a receipt, a bill, or a bank statement, and Dext will collect the information you want and deliver it to your accounting system. You’ll get the precise figures you need instead of being required to sit down and physically input them.

Dext Prepare captures and processes market-leading data before publishing it to your accounting system. Your team’s schedule is freed up for more vital work, and you receive the assurance that you’re dealing with the best.

Shoeboxed

If you’re looking for reliable storage for digital tax receipts, then ShoeBoxed would be an ideal receipt scanner app. It will help you make your receipt handling easier.

Features

• Simplify every day’s bookkeeping tasks.
• Explore features and tools built for small businesses, accountants, and bookkeepers.
• You can have your receipts turned into extracted, human-verified, categorized, organized, searchable, and editable data that you can access whenever and wherever you want.

In addition to that, you can create comprehensive expense reports that include images of your receipts and export, share, or print your data for easy tax preparation or reimbursement.

Easy Expense

Easy Expense extracts essential information such as vendor, division, taxes, sum, and payment type using powerful image processing and AI.

In addition, this receipt scanner monitors credit card and bank account spending effortlessly. Easy Expense integrates with your bank accounts to scan up to 18 months of transactions for costs and tax write-offs.

Features

• Works offline, making it ideal for on-the-go use.
• Fastest way to capture, crop, and track receipts
• Never lose a receipt with auto-cloud sync.
• Smart auto-categorization to maximize deductions
• Bulk review transactions

Using Easy Expense, you can sync between users in real-time through user permissions. You can easily limit who can see relevant information.

Expense Management

From limitless receipt scanning and mileage monitoring to next-day reimbursement, a cost-tracking tool like Expense Management may help you manage your accounting system.

Features

• Tracking and organizing receipts when traveling or working remotely may be difficult and sometimes result in receipt loss.
• You may scan receipts without restriction, log your mileage, email them for approval, and do other things.

When combined with the SmartScan function, your receipts are instantly scanned and retrieved, saving you time and energy.

Smart Receipts

Smart Receipts transform your phone into a receipt scanner and expenditure report generator! It collects receipt information and lets you create PDF, and CSV reports that you can send to your email accounts.

Features

• Professional reports can be built both for your budget monitoring and the demands of your work using completely configurable PDF, CSV, and ZIP reports.
• Smart Receipts enables you to choose from over 20 different default data types (such as dates, prices, taxes, receipt categories, remarks, payment options, and so on).

This feature can be useful to assist you in creating the ideal document, saving you countless hours of labor and allowing you to focus on things that are more vital to you.

Foreceipts

The Foreceipts app is the ideal receipt management solution, with over 500,000 company owners, self-employed workers, agencies, and freelancers globally using it.

Features

• Take images of your paper receipts or send your digital receipts to yourself. The Foreceipts app will instantly scan the data on your receipts and enter it into your book. You may also add income by scanning your invoices.
• Share your Excel or PDF spending reports with your accountant or use them to file your taxes. Each of your receipt pictures is stored, so you’re protected in the event of an audit.

They have established business spending categories for the United States and Canada, so your year-end expense report will properly meet the tax-filing requirements. You may also change the categories as needed.

Veryfi

The world’s fastest and safest OCR Capture and Data Extraction app for receipts, bills and invoices are here. Get rid of data input and bookkeeping; save hours each week. Veryfi retrieves vendors, payments, totals, taxes, and even line items in seconds.

Features

• Veryfi’s OCR API extracts, categorizes, and enhances all the information from unorganized consumer purchasing records, invoices, and bills down to line items (SKU-level purchase data) at scale, removing the need for scripts or humans-in-the-loop.
• The Veryfi OCR API provides you with one of the most influential and sophisticated OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition) data extraction API platforms available these days.

These features will allow you to outperform your competition and give your users the best services possible in the whole market.

How to Choose the Most Appropriate Receipt App?

Keeping receipts properly organized is one of the simplest ways to avoid tax-season stress. The tools we’ve mentioned make it accessible without needing to preserve hundreds of little paper slips.

Consider your individual needs as a freelancer or business owner whenever you agree to one. Think about the following:

• How many people do you supervise?
• How many customers do you look after?
• How many commercial purchases do you make each month?
• How frequently and where do you travel for work?

Depending on your circumstances, you may need multiple tools to customize your receipt-tracking system.

Conclusion 

You need to keep track of your office expenses organized so you don’t lose the right to get paid back for them. If you don’t, the money won’t be available until the next payment cycle.

So, many different kinds of software can be used as receipt scanners. Each one makes this process easier by offering better features and services. So, let’s wrap it up. The top receipt-scanning apps listed above are worth using. If you haven’t already, you should get one!

You may also explore some best expense tracking/management software for small and medium business Owners.