Receipt Scanner Expense App, Every Line Read | Cash Book

Receipts have one job: telling you what you spent. In most apps they turn into a photo you never open again, filed in a gallery you will scroll past for years without reading. Here they turn into transactions. Then the photo is gone.

Camera or photo library

Tap the coral camera circle at the bottom of Home. A small sheet called Snap a receipt opens with two doors. Camera, hinted "Point at the receipt", gives you the viewfinder. Photo library, hinted "A photo or screenshot you already have", gives you the camera roll instead.

The second door matters more than it sounds, because a great deal of what people buy now never produces a piece of paper at all. The card notification. The order confirmation. The delivery app summary at the end of a takeaway. Every one of those is a screenshot away, and Cash Book reads a screenshot the way it reads a till receipt.

Every line gets read

An AI model looks at the image and returns what it found. One coffee, one transaction. A supermarket receipt comes back with the merchant in the note and the tag matched to your own tags, so a Lidl bill lands under Groceries with its emoji. Bills and screenshots carrying several charges are read line by line, each with its own amount and the date printed on the paper.

Thermal receipts are where it gets interesting. The merchant line on a faded one often prints as an abbreviation and a store number, and what comes back is a note only the shop's accountant would recognise. The amount is nearly always right. The name sometimes needs a hand.

So nothing is saved without you seeing it. The transactions appear on Home in the day's list with an Edit option, and that sheet is the same one the keypad uses. Retag it, move it to another account, fix the date. Done.

The photo is processed, not stored

Scanning needs a connection, because the reading happens on an AI model reached through the studio's relay rather than on the phone. The photo is sent, parsed and dropped. Cash Book keeps the transactions on your iPhone, with optional iCloud sync to your own Apple account, and never keeps the image.

Which also means no receipt gallery to manage and no storage counter creeping up. If you want the paper for a warranty, keep the paper. The app only ever needed the numbers.

Snap, say or tap

The camera is one of several ways in, and it is not always the right one. A coffee is faster said than photographed, and voice logging takes one sentence. A card tap is faster still: Apple Pay auto-logging can write it before you have put the phone away, and then the receipt only matters if you need the split.

Where the camera wins outright is the long bill. A weekly shop, a restaurant table for six, a hotel folio with eight lines on it. Nobody is dictating that, and nobody is typing it either.

For the step-by-step version, including what to do with a faded receipt or a very long grocery bill, read how to scan receipts into an expense tracker.

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