Whether you own your own business or you’re just trying to track expenses as part of your job, the following 10 apps will help you scan, track, and manage your receipts.
The criteria used to select the best receipt scanning app include ease of use, scan quality, OCR functionality, and user reviews.
The best apps for scanning and managing receipts include:
- Distribution
- Smart Receipts
- Wave for Business Receipt
- ABUKAI Cost
- Genius Scanner
- Remove the scanner
- Tiny scanner
- Office lens
- Fitfin budgeting app
- Zoho
Table of Contents
1. Expansion
Expensify is included on most lists of apps for scanning and managing receipts, and for good reason. It’s an award-winning app that does everything you need in such an app.
Expensify allows you to take a picture of the receipt and it will process the photo of the receipt to pull out all the important details.
The value this app offers over others is that it saves time when you’re trying to save receipts. This is very important when you are traveling and don’t have much time to deal with them. The ability to take pictures and run is very important.
Some of Expensify’s best features include:
- Includes a feature for distance tracking
- Integrate with your phone’s GPS sensor
- Enter credit card transactions
- Integration with accounting software such as Quick book or NetSuite
Download Expensify: For Android, For iOS
2. Smart receipts
Smart Receipts is a receipt-focused app that makes it very simple to record and organize your receipts.
It basically makes your mobile phone a receipt scanner in your pocket. On top of that, it will save you time when you want to generate expense reports and even allow you to track more distance when you’re on the go.
Basically, it helps you keep track of everything that takes time to track while you’re on the go.
The best features of Smart Receipts include:
- Customize PDF, CSV or ZIP format reports that you can export
- Free and open source
- Take a picture of the receipt or import from your photo gallery
- Tag receipts you’ve taken with metadata to help you find them later
- Track your distance on the go
- Sync your receipts and reports with Google Drive
- Has an OCR feature to recognize text from your scans
Download Smart Receipts: For Android, For iOS
3. Wave receipt
Another app that mainly focuses on saving and managing your receipts is Wave Receipts. The app is exceptionally easy to use and syncs with your free Wave account for cloud storage of all those receipts.
The cool thing about this is that no matter if you lose your phone, you will always have access to your important travel records through the web.
Some of the key features of Receipts by Wave include:
- One of the best OCR text recognition of any receipt scanner app
- Wave’s cloud-based accounting software lets you incorporate receipts into reports
- Scan multiple receipts (up to 10) at once.
- You don’t have to be online to scan and save receipts
- Edit notes to go with scanned receipts
Download Wave Receipts: For Android, For iOS
4. Cost of ABUKAI
Abukai is a surprisingly simple app that has one main purpose and that is to manage all your expenses without much effort.
Saving your receipt is actually a two-step process with this app. Simply take a photo of your receipt or receipt while traveling and send it to save to your phone. The app processes receipts for expense reports that you’ve set up, which you can send to your email or any other email address.
The app has received numerous awards from big names like Nasdaq and PC Magazine. Most of the praise comes from the way Abukai automates report generation for you. Reports can be exported in Excel or PDF format.
The free version includes 12 expense reports a year, which means that if you only need it to send out a single report each month, it won’t cost you a dime.
Download Abukai: For Android, For iOS
5. Scan Genius
It’s not just receipt scanning apps that do the trick when it comes to scanning and managing your receipts. If you think about it, all you really need is an efficient scanning app to do the job.
Genius Scan is one of the perfect apps for this. If you are looking for the simplest app to scan and store receipts while traveling, this is it. The app allows you to export those scans to any of your cloud storage accounts via JPEG or PDF.
It integrates with Box, Dropbox, Evernote, etc
Features of this impressive document scanner app include:
- Document detection and perspective correction
- Scan multiple receipts at once.
- High quality scans
- Tag receipts to make them much easier to find
- All receipts are instantly stored on the phone for best security
Download Genius Scan: For Android, For iOS
6. Remove the scanner
Clear Scanner is one of the scanner apps that make a perfect receipt manager. That’s especially true for Clear Scanner because of its built-in OCR capabilities so that text from your receipts is recognized and entered as well.
You can use Clear Scanner while traveling to quickly capture receipts and save them as PDF documents or JPEG format that you can attach to your expense reports.
The app automatically detects the corners of the receipt, so you save only the receipt itself and nothing else, which can save space in your mobile device. You can also edit photos before saving to your device.
The app also syncs with Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, Evernote, and other cloud services so you can access your receipts from anywhere.
Download Clear Scanner: For Android, For iOS
7. Tiny scanner
If simplicity is what you’re looking for, look no further than the Small Scanner. It basically turns your mobile phone into a portable document scanner. It is also lightweight so it hardly takes up any memory in your device. It saves all receipts (or other documents) as images or PDF documents.
Because it’s so light, it’s also lightning fast.
While it’s just a document scanner, it’s also a great way to organize receipts as it includes the ability to organize those scans into multiple folders. You can share scans via email, to any cloud account like Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, or even over Wi-Fi directly to your computer.
If the most important feature of a receipt scanner is lightness and speed, then this is the app for you.
Download Tiny Scanner: For Android, For iOS
8. Office lenses
Office Lens is a free mobile application from Microsoft. It is a document scanner but is especially suitable for scanning receipts.
The scan works particularly well, as Office Lens automatically cuts and enhances the document so that the text on it is easy to read. You can then export the scan to any Office application like Word or PowerPoint, you can just send the PDF to your email or OneDrive account.
The nice thing about using an app like Office Lens is that it’s not just for receipts. You can use it to scan and store any document and use those scans in the many other applications it integrates with.
Not only does it help you scan and manage receipts, but it also allows you to be much more productive with all the paper documents you handle.
Download Office Lens: For Android, For iOS
9. Fitfin Budgeting App
When most people think of receipt scanning apps, they think of business and travel expenses. But the truth is that one of the most common uses for scanning receipts is in family budget planning.
One of the easiest ways to stay on track is to keep track of your expenses. And the easiest way to capture every expense is to store every receipt from every purchase you make. This makes it easy to remember how much it used to be when updating your budget.
Fitfin is specially made for this purpose. You can add budget folders to the app and record receipts that apply specifically to your budget area.
The great thing about using this app to scan receipts is that it has the bonus of helping you create and keep your budget.
Download Fitfin: For Android, For iOS
10. Zoho
No list of receipt scanning apps would be complete without Zoho. Zoho is best known for providing cloud-based office apps like Email, Calendar, etc. But what many people don’t realize is that Zoho also offers a great receipt scanning mobile app.
This app provides access to all of those Office apps. But most importantly, when you tap CostYou can quickly upload receipts by snapping receipts.
The Zoho app will do the OCR scan on the receipt and fill out all the details in the expense form for you. This saves a lot of time, and it allows you to quickly apply those details to your expense tracking records.
Zoho is an app that has a lot of functionality beyond receipt scanning, making it an easy choice if you want access to the full Zoho product suite.
Download Zoho: For Android, For iOS
Use a receipt scanner app
The ability to convert paper receipts into digital format can make tracking your expenses much simpler. And with most apps offering the feature to even automatically send those receipts to an expense report can make traveling for work a breeze.
Choosing the right receipt scanner app really depends on when you need to scan apps and how you need to use them. Try out a few of these apps and see for yourself which one is right for you.
