OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, is the process by which computers look at an image — an image of a receipt, for example — and figure out if there’s writing on it, and what it all says. The new version of the Android app essentially gives Wave better pictures of your receipts, so that the accuracy of the OCR is better. Yes, as most digital scanners use advanced security features—such as SSL and MFA—to keep sensitive information protected. Leveraging my accounting and bookkeeping expertise, I rigorously assess software using a structured rubric that objectively scores key features while upholding editorial independence. Expensify seems to meet customer expectations for functionality with a user-friendly dashboard and users like the integrations with accounting systems such as QBO which makes quick reimbursements possible. Organize and access your receipt data digitally, in one place, and avoid tax season nightmares.
Wave app has a dashboard and provides features like creating customized invoices, mobile invoicing, and creating and sending estimates. With the help of Readdle Scanner Pro, users can track expenses, protect against lost or faded receipts, and submit expense reports. It also ensures clarity in everyday spending, like tracking payments for your child’s music lessons or verifying purchases for household items.
The great thing about using this app for receipt scanning isthat it has the bonus of helping you create and keep to your budget. If the most important feature of a receipt scanneris lightweight and speed, then this is the app for you. Clear Scanner is one of those scanner apps that make aperfect receipt manager. That’s especially true with Clear Scanner because ofthe built-in OCR capability so that text from your receipts are recognized andimported as well. It isn’t just receipt-scanning apps that’ll do the trickwhen it comes to scanning and managing your receipts.
Receipt scanning apps are generally safe as receipts don’t usually contain sensitive financial data. These apps typically use strong encryption and secure servers to protect data. Read the privacy policy of a receipt scanner app to understand its regulatory compliance standard. Also, before uploading receipts on any free expense app, ensure that the receipt doesn’t contain any data that is at risk of potential misuse.
If you’ve ever had to dig through folders to find receipts from years ago, this feature is a real time-saver. QuickBooks, frequently called QBO, is arguably the widest-used accounting software. While customers love the product itself and its features, service doesn’t fare so well. Notably, customers are dissatisfied with customer service wait times and lack of satisfactory problem resolutions.
Wave’s receipt scanner app automatically syncs with Wave Accounting, a free cloud-based accounting software, and even allows you to export your data to other accounting tools like QuickBooks. FreshBooks performed well in my rubric for basic receipt scanning features. It beats Wave by offering helpful functionalities like autoforwarding receipts from email and cloud drives.
Inventory Management
Wave took a hit in my integration evaluation because I can’t connect it to time tracking and electronic bill pay processors. For comparison, QuickBooks actually has electronic bill pay and time tracking built into all its plans except Simple Start. During the reconciliation process, Wave attempts to match manually inputted transactions to transactions imported from your bank and does a pretty good job. However, if it fails, it doesn’t allow you to manually match the imported transaction to the manually inputted transaction. You’ll need to watch for this carefully and then delete the imported transaction to avoid duplication.
Best for Sales-Oriented Companies
Neat also has many advanced features like organizing documents, file sharing, and expense tracking. At $200 a year for unlimited storage, it’s undeniably a steal for businesses with significant document management needs. QuickBooks Online is a popular and comprehensive accounting software with a built-in receipt scanner on mobile.
Best for Human Verification of Scanned Data
The interconnectedness of the Wave Suite also allows the system’s Learning Engine to make the system program each time it is used. You can set up multiple sales tax rates, apply them to invoices, and generate reports to help with tax compliance. This assessed the ability to print checks, establish live bank feeds, and import bank transactions from a file. We wanted to see the ability to reconcile bank accounts with or without imported bank transactions and a list of book transactions that have not yet cleared the bank. Wave lacks inventory management features, so if you’re a product-based business, consider QuickBooks Online. This means that Wave can’t calculate your COGS, which is important if you deal with inventory.
Its mobile app scanner can capture multi-page and long receipts and compile different scans into a single file. The software provides many ways to organize extracted data—by date, item category, currency, tax, invoice number or payment status. These auto-organization options significantly benefit large teams that process many documents—not just receipts but invoices and other expenses. Neat aced my assessment of basic features because it offers everything I was looking for, including receipt scanning, manual receipt uploading, OCR, and document categorizing and tagging.
- The feature-packed plan called the Pro plan is $16 per month ($170 per year).
- Part of the larger Zoho group of ERP software applications, Zoho Expense is designed to work best with other Zoho apps.
- The individual version offers a free trial with up to 25 scans per month.
- It’s a little pricier than the cheapest options on the list, but it can auto-scan long documents with great accuracy.
- However, it’s a good thing that I’m able to upload my bank statements from CSV or Excel files and perform bank reconciliations.
The app extracts key details, including the receipt image, merchant name, payment date, currency, and total amount spent. As for teams, it allows you to keep track of expenses for small groups (1-9 employees) and larger organizations (10+ employees). Compared with others on this list, Zoho Expense leads in customer support, offering a wide range of support channels.
- The app also syncs with Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive,Evernote, and other cloud services so you can access your receipts from anywhere.
- If you’ve ever had to dig through folders to find receipts from years ago, this feature is a real time-saver.
- While we’ve explored traditional receipt scanner apps for professional expense management and personal receipt tracking, there’s another popular category among users, particularly in the US and Canada.
- When the user verifies that the information is correct, the transaction is automatically posted.
Features like automated data extraction and customizable fields (e.g., Supplier, Due Date, Taxes, and Line items) make tasks like PO-matching and expense categorization more efficient and accurate. These features ensure that accountants and bookkeepers can maintain precise financial records with minimal manual effort. Features include expense reporting, automatic financial statement generation, and integrations with tools like Zoho CRM, Zapier, and others.
Does Wave have a feature for tracking sales tax?
However, FreshBooks falls short in advanced features, as it lacks file-sharing and organization tools. This limitation is understandable, given that FreshBooks is primarily designed as accounting software. Neat is a fairly straightforward receipt scanner and expense management app. You can use mobile to take photos of receipts, invoices and other documents, automatically uploading them to the app. Neat’s OCR data tool will analyze your documents line-by-line and extract key information, organizing your documents by whatever category you choose.
Additionally, I can’t set a closing date to lock prior-year transactions, which would help prevent unauthorized changes to my financial data. Zoho is a highly functional app beyond the receipt scanningfeature, making it an easy choice if you want access to the full suite of Zohoproducts. Even though it’s just a document scanner, it’s also a greatway to organize receipts because it includes the ability to sort those scansinto multiple folders. You can share the scans via email, to any cloud accountslike Dropbox, Evernote, or Google Drive, or even over Wi-Fi directly to yourcomputer. You can use Clear Scanner while you’re traveling to quicklycapture receipts and save them as PDF documents or JPEG format that you canattach to your expense reports.
Assisted Bookkeeping Options
The wave receipt scanner free version includes 12 expense reports a year, whichmeans if you only need it to send a single report a month, you won’t have tospend a dime. It basically helps you track everything that takes time totrack when you’re traveling for your job. Managing receipts can be challenging, but the right app can simplify the process. IScanner’s Text Extractor will accurately recognize text from your receipts, which allows you to extract text and save it as a text file. Once saved, you can email the file to yourself or others, edit it, search within it, and, most importantly, copy and paste the content to save precious time and effort.
It’s an ideal solution for small businesses with fewer than 10 employees that handle a high volume of receipts and documents. That said, Neat’s robust capabilities might feel like overkill for freelancers or self-employed individuals who only manage a handful of receipts or documents. For them, an accounting software with built-in receipt scanning like Wave and FreshBooks might be a better fit. Users do praise ease of use for invoicing, expense tracking and basic receipt management. However, they long for more features and a better customer service experience.