What the receipt scanner does
Typing every line of a supermarket receipt is tedious. The scanner in SpendWe turns a photo of the receipt into a finished expense: the amount, the shop, the date, a suggested category and, when you want them, the individual items.
Text recognition runs on your phone, with Apple's Vision on iPhone and iPad and Google's ML Kit on Android. SpendWe groups what it reads into rows before deciding anything, so a subtotal or a tax line is not mistaken for the total.
How to scan a receipt, step by step
- Open the add sheet and tap Scan a receipt, or pick a photo you already took.
- Capture the receipt. A long receipt can be captured in sections, up to eight pages. SpendWe removes the overlap between sections so no line is counted twice.
- Check the review screen. It shows the detected amount, the merchant, the date, the suggested category and the list of items. If the total it found is wrong, choose another amount it read.
- Look at the items line. SpendWe compares the items with the total and says "Items add up" or by how much they differ. If they do not add up, the app asks before saving.
- Save. The expense goes into your history and your budgets at once. If you correct the category, SpendWe remembers it for that merchant next time.
Receipts in another currency
On holiday or after an online order, the receipt is often not in your own currency. SpendWe detects the currency printed on the receipt, such as $ or £, and converts the total into your app currency at today's rate. The original amount and currency stay on the expense, so the row reads, for example, "Paid 20.29 USD" next to the converted figure.
The rates come from a free source that needs no account. They are cached for 12 hours, and when you are offline SpendWe uses the last rates it saved. The rate is today's rate, not the one your bank applied, so a card statement can differ by a few cents. For a whole trip in another currency, a trip keeps its own currency and conversion.
SpendWe supports 11 app currencies: euro, US dollar, pound sterling, Swiss franc, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand dollar, Moroccan dirham, UAE dirham, Japanese yen and Swedish krona. Currencies without decimals, like the yen, are handled correctly.
Items, weights and who each item is for
Each line of the receipt becomes an item you can keep or remove. Weighed lines such as "0.745 kg @ £1.14/kg" are read as one line with the right price. In a shared household, an "All items" row assigns every line to one person or to both at once, and you can still change single items. The summary under the list always adds up to the receipt total. Choosing who each item is for, and giving an item its own category, are part of SpendWe Pro.
Your receipt photo, your choice
SpendWe asks what to do with the photo: Don't keep the photo, Keep on this device, or Keep and back up. You can tighten that choice for a single receipt, for example to keep a pharmacy receipt only on your phone. A setting on one receipt can stop a backup, never start one.
If you switch on Use AI (the app asks when you first open it), each scan's photo, reduced and without its location or other metadata, and its recognised text are sent to Anthropic's AI to read each item; SpendWe's server never stores the photo. With Use AI off, the scan stays on your phone. Details are in the Privacy Policy.
What is free
The free plan includes one receipt scan a week. Unlimited scanning is planned for SpendWe Pro, which is not on sale yet; see pricing. Adding an expense by hand is always free and unlimited, and so is the export of your data.
For a step-by-step guide, read How to track spending abroad with receipts in another currency.
