Read a receipt
Turning a photographed receipt into its merchant, line items, taxes and payment, on any transaction the photo is attached to.
What a transcript is
A transaction records one figure: what you spent. A receipt records how that figure was arrived at, line by line. A transcript is that second thing, read off the photograph and kept with it: the merchant and its address, every line item with quantity and price, each tax bracket, the totals, and how it was paid.
It belongs to the photograph rather than to any import. Whatever put the transaction in your records, a receipt attached to it can be read out, and the transcript stays with the file rather than with the row.
It is generated when you ask for it, not automatically. Reading an image costs something, and most receipts are attached as proof rather than to be itemized, so nothing is read until you press the button.
Have the photograph on the transaction
A receipt that arrived as an import is already attached and needs none of this. This step is for the other case: a card purchase that came off a bank statement, or a transaction you entered yourself, where you hold the paper receipt and want what is on it.
Open the transaction, go to Attachments, and choose Add file. Attach files to a transaction covers that dialog and what the sharing switch beside each file does.
JPEG, PNG and WebP can be read, and an iPhone's HEIC photo works too: it is converted to JPEG as it is uploaded, so it previews and transcribes like any other photograph. A PDF attaches like any other file but cannot be transcribed, so no button appears beside it.
Generate the transcript
An attached image with nothing read out yet shows a Receipt transcript row with a Generate button. Press it.
The request is queued rather than run while you wait, so the row switches to Generating transcript and you can carry on. It takes a few moments. The transcript appears on its own when it is ready, without a refresh, and you can leave the page and come back to it.
Only the owner of a file can generate its transcript. Someone you share a budget with sees the receipt you attached, and any transcript you have already made, but has no button of their own and cannot change yours.
What it reads out
The finished transcript opens as a panel under the attachment, grouped the way the receipt is: Store, Receipt info, Items, Totals, Tax breakdown, Payment and Notes.
Text is kept in the language it was printed in rather than translated, so a Dutch supermarket receipt stays Dutch. Dates and times are normalised, currencies come back as ISO codes, and deposit and discount lines are marked as what they are rather than folded into the items around them.
The transcript does not change the transaction. Its amount, date, category and budget are yours and stay as you left them; reading the receipt adds detail beside them rather than overwriting them.
Correcting what it read
Edit on the transcript panel opens every field, including the item rows, and saves what you write as the transcript. A faded price or a folded corner is quicker to fix by hand than to photograph again.
An edited transcript is treated as read: it will not offer to generate over the top of your corrections.
Generating again is still available on the file itself if you want a fresh reading, and it is not destructive. The transcript you have stays readable until a new one arrives to replace it, so a second attempt cannot leave you with less than you started with.
When the image cannot be read
If the reading fails, the row says so and why, with a Retry next to it. The commonest reason is that the photograph is not a receipt at all, which is reported as exactly that rather than as a vague failure.
The rest are worth a second photograph rather than a second attempt: a receipt cut off at the edge, one lit so unevenly that half of it is dark, or a long till roll shot from far enough away that the lines are no longer legible. Fill the frame with the receipt, flatten it, and light it evenly.
A failed reading leaves everything else alone. The photograph stays attached, the transaction is untouched, and any transcript you already had is still there.