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Log expenses from a receipt photo
In AI Money you log an expense by photographing the receipt, and the ticket comes back as a movement with its amount, its merchant, its date and its category. You can shoot it at the till or pick a photo you already have in the gallery. The category comes from your own list, not from a generic one, and when the ticket prints the card that paid, the expense lands in that account. The free plan includes 2 scans a month inside the app, and receipts sent to the WhatsApp bot count on their own allowance of 10 images a day. Pro raises the in-app scan to 10 a day. It runs on iPhone, iPad and Android.
How do you scan a receipt to log an expense?
Three taps, and you can put the phone back in your pocket while it works.
- In AI Money, tap the + button and choose Scan AI.
- Photograph the ticket, or pick one from the gallery if you shot it earlier.
- Wait a few seconds. The movement is saved on its own, and tapping the confirmation opens it in case you want to change something.
Nothing else is asked of you. No form to fill in, no category to hunt for in a menu, no date to type. A ticket from last Thursday is dated last Thursday, not the day you got round to photographing it, which is the part that usually goes wrong when you catch up on a week of receipts in one sitting.
What does the AI read off a ticket?
Six fields, and every one of them is what the movement needs to be useful later.
| Field | Where it comes from | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Amount | The line printed as the total, or the one next to the payment method | 84.20 |
| Merchant | The business name on the ticket, with branch numbers, addresses and tax IDs stripped out | Trader Joe’s |
| Date | The date printed on the ticket, and the day of the scan when the paper does not show one | 14 August |
| Category | Your own category list, chosen from the merchant and the items | Groceries |
| Currency | The currency the ticket is in, kept as printed | USD |
| Card or wallet | The payment line, when the ticket prints it | Visa ending 1234 |
Cents follow the currency of the ticket. A receipt for 21.87 dollars is saved as 21.87, and a receipt in a currency that does not use cents, such as Colombian pesos or Japanese yen, is saved as a whole number instead of a false 0.00 tail.
Which number does it take when the ticket shows subtotal, tax and tip?
The one you actually paid. A printed ticket is full of numbers that are not the charge, and picking the wrong one is the classic way a scanner quietly ruins a month of budgets.
The amount is taken from the line labelled TOTAL, or from the figure next to the payment method, and when those two agree that is the answer. The tax breakdown is ruled out on purpose, and so are the subtotal, the discount, the savings line, the change given, the tip, the unit price of a product, the quantity, the item code and any card or authorisation number. A tax base is always smaller than what was paid, which is precisely why it is such an easy number to grab by mistake.
Over the 30 days to 27 August 2026, about one in five of the people who used any AI feature in AI Money photographed at least one receipt, and more than 750 tickets were read between the in-app scanner and the WhatsApp bot. Internal AI Money measurement.
Does it also read invoices, transfer vouchers and screenshots?
Yes, and the document decides what gets saved. Purchase tickets, invoices and payment vouchers all go through the same scanner.
A voucher for money you received is saved as income rather than as an expense, with a category taken from your income list: a transfer received, a payroll stub, a refund confirmation. A screenshot of a statement, or two different tickets photographed together, produces one movement per line, each with its own date and its own total. A single ticket with mixed items stays as one movement with its total, because re-adding the line items almost never matches what was charged once discounts, taxes and units are in play, and splitting it would leave you sorting products one by one.
Which account does a scanned expense land in?
The one the ticket says paid for it. Vouchers usually print it near the payment line, as a card ending in four digits or the name of a bank or wallet, and AI Money matches that against the accounts you already have. The shop name at the top of the ticket is the merchant, never the account.
When the paper says nothing about how it was paid, the expense goes to the account you marked as your main one, so nothing is left floating outside your balances. Changing it afterwards is one field in the movement.
How many receipts can you scan for free?
Two a month with the scanner inside the app, and there is a second door that is worth knowing about, because photographing a receipt in WhatsApp has its own separate allowance.
| How you send the receipt | Free plan | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Scan AI, inside the app | 2 a month | 10 a day |
| Photo sent to the WhatsApp bot | 10 images a day, inside the 2 daily entries | No limit |
| Typing the movement by hand | Unlimited | Unlimited |
So if you are on the free plan and you come home with a fistful of tickets, sending them to the bot on WhatsApp is the roomier route: the photo is read the same way and the movement ends up in the same list. Linking your number takes about a minute and it is done once.
What happens to the photo of the receipt?
It is resized on the phone, to around 1024 pixels wide, and sent to an AI Money server, which passes it to OpenAI’s vision model. That step is what turns a picture into an amount, and the app’s privacy policy discloses it.
The photo is read at high detail rather than at the cheaper low resolution pass, and that is a deliberate call. Shrinking a ticket to 512 pixels is much cheaper to process, but what disappears at that size is the fine print, which is exactly where the total and the name of the shop live. It is the difference between a scanner that works on a glossy restaurant bill and one that also works on a faded thermal ticket from a corner shop.
What stays afterwards is the movement, not the picture: the photo is not attached to the transaction and there is no gallery of receipts inside the app. Your list of movements is stored on the phone, in a local database. Cloud backup and syncing across devices are a switch in Settings and part of Pro, so if you never turn it on, your history is not copied to any server.
What if it reads something wrong?
You fix it in the movement itself, and it takes one tap from the confirmation that appears when the scan finishes. Amount, category, title, date, currency, account and even whether it was an expense or income are all editable, the same as any transaction you typed by hand.
Merchants with ambiguous names are what confuse the category most: a pharmacy that also sells groceries, a restaurant named like a clothing shop, a charge that shows up under a holding company rather than the brand on the door. And if the picture is not a receipt at all, a screenshot of something else or a photo taken by accident, the app says it could not read a receipt there instead of inventing a number.
What does receipt scanning cost?
Nothing to start, and no card is asked for. The free plan includes the 2 monthly scans, the 10 daily receipt photos through WhatsApp, unlimited manual transactions, and as many categories and budgets as you want.
AI Money Pro takes the in-app scanner to 10 receipts a day and lifts the chat limit. In the United States it costs 3.99 dollars a month or 32.99 a year; everywhere else each app store sets the price, and the app shows it in your currency before you confirm anything.
Frequently asked questions about scanning receipts
You tap the + button inside the app, choose Scan AI and photograph the ticket, or pick a photo you already have in the gallery. A few seconds later the movement is saved with its amount, its merchant, its date and a category taken from your own list, and tapping the confirmation opens it if you want to change anything. It works on iPhone, iPad and Android.
Two a month with the scanner inside the app, with no card and no trial that expires. Receipts photographed and sent to the AI Money bot on WhatsApp have a separate allowance of 10 images a day, inside the 2 daily entries the free plan allows, so that is the roomier route when you have several tickets to catch up on. AI Money Pro takes the in-app scanner to 10 receipts a day.
Yes. Purchase tickets, invoices and payment vouchers all go through the same scanner. A voucher for money you received, such as a transfer received, a payroll stub or a refund, is saved as income rather than as an expense, with a category from your income list. A screenshot of a statement or two tickets photographed together produce one movement per line, each with its own date and total.
The total you actually paid: the line printed as TOTAL, or the figure next to the payment method, and when both agree that is the amount. It rules out the tax breakdown, the subtotal, discounts, the change given, the tip, unit prices, quantities, item codes and card or authorisation numbers. Cents are kept for currencies that use them and dropped for currencies that do not, such as Colombian pesos or Japanese yen.
It is resized on the phone to around 1024 pixels wide and sent to an AI Money server, which passes it to OpenAI’s vision model so it can be read. That is disclosed in the app’s privacy policy. The photo is not attached to the movement and there is no receipt gallery inside the app: what remains is the transaction. Your list of movements is stored locally on the phone, and cloud backup is a switch in Settings that is part of Pro.
You do not, and the app never asks for online banking credentials either. An expense is recorded because you photographed the ticket, dictated it, sent it by message or typed it. That has a practical consequence from day one: cash gets recorded too, which is exactly what a bank-linked tracker cannot see, and it works with any shop and any bank in any country, with no supported-institution list to fall outside of.
Keep reading
- All AI Money features
- Receipt scanner apps compared, and what each one asks of you
- Send the receipt to the bot on WhatsApp instead
- Free financial calculators
- What kind of records should I keep, official IRS guidance
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