OCR of receipts

[Pmeckiffe (Peter Meckiffe)]

Add feature to photograph receipts and allow more precise categorisation of big spends.

[anon95680666]

On iPhone you can touch the transaction entry which then gives you the option of adding a receipt photograph , you can also add detailed notes to the transaction

I think this is also available on Android phones but not being a user wouldn’t know for sure -

• I searched “tagging receipts on Android” in the search “frying pan” - from this I found these posts

Attachment images rotated incorrectly

Downloading, rotating and uploading them again through the app has fixed all my existing broken images. Took a little while, but my receipts are all readable once more

and

Expenses / Book Keeping in Android App

You can do all of these things in the Android app at the moment. Tap on a transaction to change the category, and then tap on “Add Attachment” to add notes/tags a and take photos of receipts.

[Rika (Scarlet)]

@anon95680666

I think this is also available on Android phones but not being a user wouldn’t know for sure

Both notes and receipt images are available on Android as attachments to a transaction.

There are no OCR capabilities today, maybe in the future or by a 3rd party service using the API.

[anon95680666]

didn’t understand what OCR was - Optical Character Recognition ? or …

[Rika (Scarlet)]

Normally, yes. OCR = Optical Character Recognition.

[saveen]

Hey guys, this is something Monzo might explore:

Export receipts

Yes! I’m a big supporter of this feature. I built a prototype at our last hackathon and I’ll try to get it ready to share with people by the end of this weekend. Basically, at the end of every month the tool will export any transaction tagged “expenses”, download any attached receipts and email them all to your address, so you can forward on to your finance team. “MVP” OCR and integrations with Expensify, Sage etc is definitely something we want to explore.

[uncle_fungus (Andrew Schofield)]

I use scanbot on Android, which does a reasonable job of doing OCR on receipts. If we could upload PDFs that Monzo could index this could be a helpful short term solution if doing OCR on receipts is a planned feature for the future.

[alexs (Alex Sherwood)]

And there’s been some more discussion about OCR here too -

Better receipt image handling

Phone camera pics of receipts are still a valid use-case. Specially for company expenses, as you are probably on the go on those occasions. In most cases we will submit those phone pictures to Concour or similar tool the company uses. So a use-case that allows one to snap a pic of the receipt and do not care anymore about the hardcopy is welcome. There should be no need to depend on third-party tools or other apps. Adding intelligent cropping, skew correction and contrast adjustment on the c…

And the challenges of pulling data from receipts here -

Receipts

Photos are saved to your camera roll as a safety mechanism in case the photo upload fails. This is something we could potentially look at in future. What’s your specific use case? Are you attaching a high number of receipts? Email receipts capture so much useful information but they’re quite difficult to use in practice. @jelmer_snoeck and I did a hackathon project on this and we encountered several road blocks: No common identifier we can use to link card tra…

[IronsE11 (Simon)]

This would be a really useful feature. Currently I log multiple items from a single transaction in the notes so I can search for them, however an OCR feature would save me having to do this.

[aidyblue (Adrian Pine)]

Ability to scan receipt and place receipt items into a check list format in which you can check off individual items and charge individuals for their purchases on the receipt … example when out for a meal one person pays then this is divided equally per person per item rather than split.

[redshift]

I think this is on the roadmap as a long term goal. I guess this falls under OCR. It would be very useful though.

Edit: it’s on the extraordinary ideas board instead as mentioned below

[alexs (Alex Sherwood)]

This is a nice idea in theory but there’s some challenges with the technology that makes it hard to implement in practise

Perhaps Flux can save us

I’ve moved your post here to keep all of the discussion about this idea in one place, I hope that’s ok!

[alexs (Alex Sherwood)]

I’m afraid this isn’t on the product roadmap right now.

[16bitkieran (Kieran)]

It’s on the extraordinary ideas board instead https://trello.com/c/9gi4ZOht/48-ocr-receipts-and-add-the-text-to-the-metadata-so-it-can-be-searched-or-extracted-for-expense-reporting

[Jackcrwhitney (Jack)]

There’s some good stuff on that board!
Some of them I’d say could even be ticked off maybe

[TimBanting]

I would prefer a Microsoft Office Lens type way of submitting receipts. It allows you to take an image and then render it flat - de-squewing it so it looks as if it is scanned. Adding that to transactions, logging them as ‘expenses’, and then exporting a report would be great for my payroll department.

[theshillito (Peter Shillito)]

Am I right in thinking Apple Pay has the capability to pass an itemised bill with the transaction? I’m sure I read that somewhere. If places did that, no more receipts and no more wasted paper!!!

[Aleanthor (Aleksander)]

@theshillito

Am I right in thinking Apple Pay has the capability to pass an itemised bill with the transaction?

Wow! That would be amazing if merchants started using that. Monzo could integrate that straight into receipts.

Thinking of being ‘backwards compatible’ it would be great if after capturing a picture of the paper receipt Monzo using could generate a digital receipt (that would be searchable).

However, my (almost sole) use of receipts is the warranty. (I’ll create a new thread about it and link it here after it is done)

Best,

Aleksander

[icedcoffee (Phil)]

If I could simply forward a receipt from Monzo to Expensify/email address for my expenses when travelling in the US for work that would be a great plus for me.

[Aleanthor (Aleksander)]

As an alternative, you can use Curve. You can connect curve to your card. Expensify isn’t yet supported but xero is. Maybe that helps?