Paper Trail: Receipt Scanner

Take a photo of a receipt. Paper Trail reads it and files it.

Not just the total — the shop, the address, the date, every line item, the subtotal, the tax and the tip, each one separated out and each one editable before you save. A supermarket trip becomes one card on your board, not eighteen, and you can still categorise every item inside it.

BUILT FOR WRITE-OFFS, NOT JUST BUDGETING

Most expense apps tell you where your money went. Paper Trail is built around a different question: at tax time, can you prove it?

The IRS wants four things for a deductible expense — the amount, the date, the place, and the business purpose. Three of those are printed on the paper. The fourth is only in your head, and it is the one you cannot reconstruct in March. So every receipt can be tagged Business or Personal and carry a note saying why, and the Overview tells you plainly when a business receipt is still missing that reason.

Tips are captured separately, because a tip is part of a meal and meals deduct differently from travel. A receipt that adds up is marked as checked. One that doesn't says so, instead of quietly showing you a confident wrong number.

WHAT IT DOES

• Photograph a receipt and have it read automatically — on your device • Multi-item receipts split into separate, individually categorised entries • Shop, address, payment method, subtotal, tax, tip and total, all captured • Tag anything Business or Personal, with a business purpose • Mark receipts as needing reimbursement, and see what you're owed • Filter by category, date, reimbursement, or business and personal • Search by item, shop or category • Totals for a week, month, quarter, year — compared fairly against the same days of the period before • An Overview showing where the money actually goes, and where you shop • Export to Excel, with the filter you used written into the file so a partial export can never pass as the whole story • Save a copy of everything — every receipt, every photo, every note — in one file you can keep off the phone

YOUR RECEIPTS STAY YOURS

Reading happens on your iPhone, using Apple's own text recognition. No account. No sign-up. No servers. Nothing is uploaded, because there is nowhere to upload it to. Your receipts and photographs never leave your device unless you export them yourself.

That is also why there is no subscription for scanning. It costs nothing to run, so it costs nothing to use.

HONEST ABOUT WHAT IT CAN'T READ

Discovery signals