Receipt scanner app: photograph it, don’t type it

Three levels of receipt app, and why the third one is different

The first two answer how much. Only the third can answer what.

Which receipts work

Belegio is built and tested for printed European receipts — supermarkets, drugstores, restaurants, hardware stores. If you shop in Germany, Austria or Switzerland, this works today, including with the interface set to English.

Receipts from the UK, North America, Australia and Japan are not verified yet. The app can be installed there, the interface and categories are translated — but we haven’t tested the recognition against enough real receipts from those countries to claim it works, so we don’t.

Handwritten receipts don’t work at all. On very long or faded receipts, lines are sometimes merged.

How the scan works

1. Photograph. Take a picture in the app, or share one in from your camera roll.
2. Recognition. Store, date, every line item, discounts and VAT rates are read out. Around ten seconds.
3. The arithmetic check. Before saving, Belegio adds up the recognised items and compares that with the total printed on the receipt. A mismatch is shown to you immediately. This is the part most tools skip, and it’s the reason the statistics can be trusted later — a recognition error that nobody notices doesn’t stay small, it quietly poisons every chart built on top of it.
4. Correction sticks. If a category is wrong, change it once. The app remembers that choice for the same product from then on.

What item-level data lets you ask

• “How often do I actually buy this?” Every product you’ve scanned is searchable.
• “Has this got more expensive?” Price history per product, from your own purchases — not an inflation index, your brand in your shop.
• “Which shop is cheaper for me?” Compared on the basket you really buy, not a sample one.
• “Where did the month go?” Categories, from a seven-block overview down to the single item.
• “Am I over budget?” Monthly limits per category, with a warning before you hit them.
• “What did I spend at Lidl this month?” Ask it in plain language; the answer comes from your own receipts.

If you share the budget with someone: budget app for couples.