How TaskSpend receipt scanning works
The promise is simple: point your camera at a receipt, and by the time you put your wallet away, the expense is filed. Here is what actually happens in those few seconds—and where your receipt does and does not go.
Point, scan, confirm
- Open TaskSpend and tap the camera. The scanner finds the receipt edges on its own.
- The text is read and the fields fill in: merchant, amount, date, and a suggested category.
- You glance over it, pick the project, and submit. The budget updates straight away.
You are always the editor. Nothing is saved until you have seen what was read and had the chance to fix it, which in practice takes a second or two—the usual correction is picking a different category.
It happens on your phone
The reading itself runs on your device, using Apple’s built-in text recognition. On the free plan, analysis happens on your phone too: the receipt is read and understood locally, and the photo and its text stay with your account’s private storage. There is no third-party OCR service in the middle.
Receipt images live in private storage and are only reachable through your signed-in account. We wrote more about this in Your receipts are nobody’s business but yours.
What Premium adds
Premium workspaces can turn on cloud AI analysis for trickier documents. When it is on, the recognised text of the document—never the photo—is sent for a deeper reading, which helps with long supplier invoices and dense statements. It is opt-in, agreed to in the app, and you can withdraw consent whenever you like; scanning keeps working on-device without it.
Premium also brings duplicate detection: if the same receipt is scanned twice, TaskSpend notices before it lands in the books.
Where receipts live afterwards
Each receipt stays attached to its expense, inside its project. When your accountant asks about a charge from March, you search, tap, and the paper is there—no shoebox required. And if you already have a backlog, you do not have to photograph it all: drop in a bank or card statement as a PDF or CSV and each line becomes an expense, with payments and refunds handled properly.