Budget Apps With Receipt Scanning: Compared (2026)

If you want a budget app that scans receipts, the first thing to establish is what "scans" means, because it means two completely different things and almost nobody says which one they do.

Most apps read the total: merchant, date, amount. That creates one transaction and saves you thirty seconds of typing. A few read the line items: every product on the receipt, priced and categorised separately. That turns a €62 supermarket trip into a list, and it is the only version that answers "what am I actually buying?".

On that split: Portofelo (ours) and Yomio do line items. Wallet by BudgetBakers, Money Lover and Expensify do totals. Spendee does not document receipt scanning at all, despite being recommended for it constantly.

The apps

| App | Price | Platforms | Scans receipts | Line items | Bank sync |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Portofelo | Free (50 scans/mo); Pro €2.99/mo | iOS | Yes | Yes | No, by design |
| Yomio | Free (5 receipts/mo); $5.99/mo or $49.99/yr | iOS, Android | Yes | Yes | No |
| Wallet (BudgetBakers) | Free; Premium from $5.99; Lifetime $29.99 | iOS, Android, web | Yes | No — amount, date, merchant | Yes, PSD2 |
| Money Lover | Free; Premium lifetime $19.99 | iOS, Android | Yes | No — transaction level | Yes, on paid tiers |
| Expensify | Free individual tier; Collect $5/user/mo | iOS, Android, web | Yes (SmartScan) | Only as a manual step | Yes |
| Spendee | Free; Plus $14.99/yr; Premium $35.99/yr | iOS, Android | Not documented | No | Yes, on paid tiers |

Prices checked August 2026, in the currency each company publishes. Store pricing varies by country and promotion.

Portofelo

Ours, so weigh it accordingly.

It reads the individual line items and categorises each one, which is the whole reason it exists. The free tier gives you 50 scans a month with no cap on transactions, budgets or accounts, and no ads. Pro is €2.99 a month for unlimited scans, encrypted backup and sync, and CSV export.

There is no bank connection anywhere in the app, so nothing to re-authorise every six months and no banking credentials to hand over. Your history lives in a local database. Scanning is the exception: the photo goes to an OCR service, is read, and is not stored, and the line items come back to the phone.

What annoyed me: it is iPhone only. There is no Android build, and if you are on Android this article has five other entries for a reason. There are also no shared or couple budgets yet, and the free tier's 50 scans is a real ceiling if you are scanning every coffee.

Pick Portofelo if you want the shopping itemised rather than just the spend recorded, you are on iOS, and you would rather not connect a bank at all. It's here.

Yomio

The other app doing genuine line-item extraction, and the honest answer to "is Portofelo the only one?" — it is not.

Yomio pulls each item, price and quantity off the receipt and builds an itemised history, with AI categorisation, CSV export and shared expense tracking. It is on both iOS and Android, which is the thing Portofelo cannot say.

What annoyed me: the free tier is five receipts a month, which is a demo rather than a plan — you will hit it in a week. Paid is $5.99 a month or $49.99 a year, roughly double Portofelo's Pro, and the AI chat assistant is the sort of feature that reads well in a store listing and gets used twice.

Pick Yomio if you want itemised receipts and you are on Android, or you want the shared-expenses and assistant features and do not mind the price.

Wallet by BudgetBakers

The most complete budgeting app here, and the one with the strongest European bank coverage — it connects to thousands of institutions under PSD2, which is genuinely useful in a way none of the manual apps can match.

Its receipt scanning is real but total-level. BudgetBakers' own privacy policy is unusually clear about it: receipts are analysed using "Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies and Artificial Intelligence (AI) models provided by OpenAI" to extract "e.g., amount, date, merchant". Amount, date, merchant — not the shopping.

What annoyed me: the pricing is a maze. The App Store listing shows Premium at $5.99, $14.99, $24.99 and $29.99, plus a $49.99 three-year plan and a $29.99 lifetime option, and which one you are offered depends on when you look. Working out what you will actually pay takes longer than it should.

Pick Wallet if you want bank sync in Europe and full-featured budgeting, and you are content for a scan to produce one transaction rather than a shopping list.

Money Lover

A long-established tracker with a large user base and a receipt feature that is better than nothing.

The App Store listing describes "Smart receipt scanning: Automatically extracts information and identifies transactions from scanned receipts" and a batch mode for several receipts at once. Note the word — transactions. It creates the entry; it does not break out what was in the bag.

Pricing is the friendliest thing about it: a lifetime Premium at $19.99, which after seven months is cheaper than anything charging monthly.

What annoyed me: the in-app purchase list is a museum — icon packs from old promotions, several differently-priced "Premium Upgrade, Discount" entries — and it makes an app that has been going a long time feel its age. Batch scanning is a genuinely good idea let down by only capturing totals.

Pick Money Lover if you want to pay once and never again, and total-level capture is enough.

Expensify

The outlier: this is expense-report software for work, and judging it as a household budgeting app is unfair to it.

SmartScan is mature and fast, and the free individual tier is usable for personal receipts. It can itemise — Expensify handles multiple line items as itemised expenses — but that is a deliberate step you take on a receipt you need broken down for a claim, not something that happens to your weekly shop automatically.

What annoyed me: the individual free tier's scan allowance has been changed more than once, and current third-party write-ups disagree about whether it is capped — check the app rather than an article, including this one. Paid plans are priced per member per month ($5/member on Collect), which is the giveaway that you are not the intended customer.

Pick Expensify if you are claiming expenses back from an employer or a client. For household budgeting it is the wrong tool, well made.

Spendee

Included because it comes up in nearly every "apps that scan receipts" list, and the claim does not survive checking.

Spendee's own help centre lists what Premium includes — bank, e-wallet and crypto connections, automatic imports and categorisation, unlimited wallets and budgets, shared wallets — and receipt scanning is not among them. Premium is $5.99 a month or $35.99 a year; Plus is $14.99 a year.

What annoyed me: not Spendee itself, which is a pleasant app with good shared wallets, but the number of comparison articles listing it under receipt scanning. If you are choosing on that feature, check the current listing yourself before you subscribe.

Pick Spendee if you want shared wallets and bank sync with a nicer interface than most, and you did not actually need the scanner.

How to test any of these in ten minutes

Install it, keep one supermarket receipt with at least eight items on it, and scan it.

Then ask the app a single question: what did I spend on one specific category from that receipt? Not the total — one category. If it can only tell you the total, you have a total-level scanner, whatever the store listing said. That is the whole test, and it takes one receipt.

Frequently asked questions

Which budget app scans receipts and captures individual items?

On current listings, Portofelo and Yomio extract individual line items and categorise them separately. Wallet by BudgetBakers, Money Lover and Expensify extract the merchant, date and total, which creates one transaction per receipt. Checked August 2026.

Is receipt scanning free in any of these?

Yes, with caps. Portofelo gives 50 scans a month free, Yomio five receipts a month, and Expensify has a free individual tier. Wallet and Money Lover offer scanning within their free apps but reserve much of the surrounding functionality for the paid tier.

Does receipt scanning need an internet connection?

Almost always, yes, because the image is read by a service rather than on the phone. That is true of Portofelo too: it is the one feature in the app that needs a connection, while manual entry, budgets and reports work with no connection at all.

Is scanning receipts more accurate than typing them in?

For totals, usually — the total is the largest, boldest number on a receipt and reads reliably. Line items are harder, because shops abbreviate them, so expect to correct the occasional entry. We wrote about where that accuracy actually lands in receipt scanning apps: do they actually work?.

Do any of these work without connecting a bank?

Portofelo and Yomio are manual-first and need no bank connection. Wallet, Spendee, Money Lover and Expensify all offer bank connections, and in Europe that means PSD2 re-authorisation every 180 days. More on that in the best offline budget apps.

The verdict

If the reason you want a receipt scanner is that you want to know what you are buying rather than just what you are spending, there are two answers: Portofelo on iOS, Yomio if you are on Android or want shared expenses and will pay for them.

If you want a scanner mainly to save typing, the total-level apps are fine, and Wallet is the strongest of them in Europe because the bank sync does the heavy lifting and the scan is a convenience on top.

And if you are choosing Spendee for receipt scanning, choose it for the shared wallets instead — that part is real.

Prices and features checked August 2026 against each company's current store listing or documentation. App pricing changes quietly; check before you subscribe.