Receipt OCR that actually reads your receipts.
Every expense tracker claims OCR. Most of them, in practice, mean "upload a receipt and we'll attach it to a manually-entered transaction." That's not OCR. That's a filing cabinet. Expensely's OCR is the real thing: photograph any receipt, get the vendor name, total, currency, individual line items, tax and tip pulled out and dropped into the right transaction, automatically, in under a second.
How it works
You photograph a receipt with your phone. The image is encrypted in transit, fed to our vision model, parsed into structured fields, and matched against your existing vendor list. If we've seen "Espresso Lounge" before, it's auto-categorised as Dining. If we haven't, the category is suggested. You tap to confirm, or edit a field if anything is off. Total time: about a second.
What it extracts
- Vendor name — including fuzzy matching to your past vendors.
- Total amount — and currency, detected automatically (PKR, USD, GBP, AED, EUR…).
- Date and time — from the receipt, not your phone.
- Line items — individual purchases, when present.
- Tax and tip — broken out separately for clean reporting.
- Payment method — when the receipt prints the last 4 of a card.
What makes ours different
It handles real-world receipts
Most OCR tools were trained on clean US chain-store receipts. Ours was trained on what people actually photograph: crumpled, thermal-paper, Urdu, English, mixed, partial-light, taken-while-walking. We test on a corpus of thousands of Pakistani, Middle Eastern, UK and US receipts.
It learns your vendors
The second time you photograph an Espresso Lounge receipt, the category is pre-filled. The fifth time, the OCR knows to expect the same line items and flags it if the total differs significantly. Over a few weeks, the OCR becomes your bookkeeper.
It runs in parallel
Bulk-uploading 50 receipts from a month of travel? They process in parallel, not in sequence. You see them stream into your transaction list in seconds, not minutes.
Use cases
The freelance designer in Karachi
Hassan finishes a client meeting, photographs the chai bill, walks to the parking lot, snaps the parking ticket, drives home, snaps the fuel receipt. Three receipts, three taps, three logged transactions. He never opens a spreadsheet.
The restaurant owner
Bilal's suppliers drop off paper invoices every morning. He takes a photo of each as it comes in. The OCR pulls vendor and total; he tags "Inventory" once and Expensely categorises the rest of that vendor's receipts the same way forever after.
The traveling salesperson
Faisal flies Karachi-Dubai-London in a week. Hotel receipts, taxi receipts, meal receipts in three currencies. Each photograph triggers OCR + currency detection. Back home, his expense report is already written.
Related features
- Voice entry — for the receipts you don't get printed.
- Multi-currency — for the receipts in five currencies.
- AI insights — for what the receipts mean.
Frequently asked
What kinds of receipts can the OCR read?
Paper, thermal, crumpled, low-light, English, Urdu, mixed, handwritten amounts, and most common point-of-sale receipt formats. PDFs and screenshots also work.
How accurate is the OCR?
On clear receipts, vendor and amount are ~99% accurate. On thermal or wrinkled receipts, ~95%. Every extraction is editable in one tap if something is off.
Does it work offline?
Capture is offline — your photos queue locally and OCR runs when you reconnect. Most users never notice the round-trip.
Do you store my receipt images?
By default, yes — for 90 days, encrypted, so you can re-open the original later. You can turn this off in settings; OCR works on a temporary copy that is discarded after extraction.
Can I bulk-upload a stack of receipts?
Yes. Upload up to 50 at once from desktop or share a folder from your phone. Each one is OCR’d in parallel.
Does it work for Urdu receipts?
Yes — including mixed Urdu/English, common in Pakistani retailers. See our Pakistan page for details.
Try the OCR on one of your receipts
Free plan lets you scan one receipt per day. That's usually enough to know within 30 seconds whether the OCR works for you.
Start free — no card