The 8 Best Receipt Trackers and Scanners for Small Businesses in 2023

Thanks to its high-quality image resolution and automated company-wide expense tracking, Zoho Expense is Business.org’s top receipt scanner and expense manager. Its scalable plans work just as well for large corporations as they do for small businesses and self-employed freelancers. And even though it has more features than just about any other receipt scanner, Zoho Expense is still extremely affordable—especially its free receipt app, which allows for up to three users.

But one size rarely fits all, including receipt-scanning software. If you’re wondering which receipt-scanning software is best for your unique business, check out our review of the year’s eight best receipt scanners for small businesses.

Receipt-tracking software turns your smartphone’s camera into an instant receipt-capturing device. Depending on the software you choose, you can also use it to track business expenses, reimburse employees, and access expense reports easily during tax time. Most (but not all) receipt scanners double as mileage trackers: since mileage is a key tax write-off for the self-employed, it just makes sense to track mileage while categorizing other tax deductible expenses.

A receipt scanner could also be a larger desktop device that you use to scan and upload receipts. But for most business owners (specifically freelancers and self-employed solopreneurs), smartphones are a smaller, simpler, less expensive alternative to pricier printers and scanners. For the purposes of this piece, we’re focusing mainly on receipt-scanning apps, not printers. But if you’d like a few portable scanner recommendations, jump to our FAQ section below.

It’s hard to find an app-based receipt scanner with resolution to rival Expensify’s, but QuickBooks’ comes close. The QuickBooks Online app is exceptionally user-friendly, and both iOS and Android users praise its ease of use and straightforward expense categorization.^4,5 While QuickBooks doesn’t let you add as many users as Expensify does, the priciest QuickBooks plan includes access for 25 users, all of whom can use the QuickBooks app to keep track of receipts.

But for receipt scanning and organization, QuickBooks Online’s best feature is probably its tax categorization. (Intuit, QuickBooks’ parent company, also owns TurboTax.) QuickBooks’ receipt organization by tax category is particularly useful for freelancers who depend on tax write-offs to save money at the end of the year.

Like most other comprehensive accounting options, though, QuickBooks’ receipt scanner doesn’t include any corporate features like company cards or employee reimbursement options. (You’ll only find corporate financial features with expense-focused software like Expensify.) For that reason, we recommend QuickBooks’ receipt-scanning features for freelancers and solopreneurs, not for larger businesses with multiple employees who all report expenses.

If you want to manage corporate expenses with both QuickBooks and Expensify, though, you’re in luck. Both products sync perfectly with each other: if you scan a receipt with Expensify’s app, the data will automatically sync to your financial accounts on QuickBooks.

FreshBooks is one of our favorite accounting software solutions. Its affordable starting price and well-reviewed app make it a solid alternative to QuickBooks (especially for freelancers who want software with a cheaper starting price).

FreshBooks’ main selling point, though, is its easy, professional invoicing. Most notably, FreshBooks lets you attach high-quality scanned receipt images to client invoices, which you can then send on the go. FreshBooks’ mobile accounting and invoicing app is one of the main reasons we recommend it to freelancers and contractors: if you’re documenting expenses for client reimbursement, FreshBooks’ organization helps you get paid the right amount—and on time too.

If you aren’t a contractor or freelancer, FreshBooks’ invoice scanner is a little harder to recommend, especially if you want multiple people to contribute to expense tracking. With FreshBooks, each additional user costs $10 per month. (For example, if you sign up for the $4.50 a month plan but want to add five extra users, your total monthly cost is $54.50.) If collaboration is your aim, you might want to check out Expensify, Zoho Expense, or QuickBooks Online instead.

Zoho Expense is pretty new to the receipt-scanning, expense-tracking field—which is one reason we’re blown away by the sheer amount of stellar features it offers at a completely reasonable price.

For starters, while most free expense-tracking plans limit you to only one user, Zoho’s free receipt app lets you add up to three users on the same account. If you and your business partners track expenses collectively (and if you have just 20 expenses a month), Zoho Expense is easily the most affordable pick.

Zoho Expense is also one of the only expense trackers and receipt scanners to deal with multiple currencies. We can’t recommend Zoho highly enough to business owners who travel internationally or make essential business purchases in more than one country. Plus, if your entire team travels (whether internationally or locally), Zoho’s first paid plan, Premium, adds a slew of traveling and trip-planning features. You can use Zoho Expense to approve travel requests, manage itineraries, set work travel policy, set travel allowances, and automate payments.

Looking for more reasons to try Zoho Expense? Along with multicurrency support, Zoho Expense has a host of unique features, some of which you don’t even get with comprehensive accounting software like QuickBooks:

• Budget management (broken down by project and department), including alerts when budget thresholds are exceeded
• Automatic corporate card reconciliation
• Audit and compliance assistance
• Comprehensive third-party integrations, including QuickBooks Online, Xero, Zoho Books, G Suite, Office 365, Slack, and Amazon Business
• Customer tracking
• Project tracking

Like any software provider, Zoho Expense does have some drawbacks. The free plan limits you to just 20 receipt scans a month, which is five fewer than Expensify’s free receipt scanner app. And while the free plan includes email-based customer support, phone support is limited to only paid plan users. Even paid users can only get assistance during regular working hours: 24/7 support costs an additional fee.

Expensify has slightly fewer features than Zoho Expense, but it’s been around much longer, costs about the same, and is one of the most trusted names in expense tracking. Its plans bundle expense management and receipt scanning into a comprehensive bargain:

• Unlimited receipt scans and uploads via the Expensify mobile app
• Automatically generated expense reports with each upload
• Automatic expense approval and next-day employee reimbursement
• Automatic mileage tracking for travel expenses

Notice how frequently the word “automatic” appears in Expensify’s feature list? Expensify ensures you don’t have to do much beyond snapping pictures of receipts. You don’t even have to approve employee expenses: just set the software to flag anything that needs managerial approval. Everything else gets automatically approved for speedy reimbursement.

The software’s heftier corporate plans pack even more of a punch, including corporate card management, multilevel workflow approval, and automatic expense report exports to accounting software. Expensify’s plans for individuals start at $4.99 per month. Its corporate plans start at $5 per user per month (when billed annually) or $10 per user per month (when billed monthly).

Frankly, it’s hard to find much wrong with Expensify. The app’s reviews are absurdly high: the iOS app scores 4.7 stars among 105K users,¹ while the Google Play store gives it a 4.4 among 17.4K users.² You can point the camera at a piece of paper with a number scribbled on it and the software can still read the number—no other receipt-scanning app’s OCR (optical character recognition) offers that kind of clarity and precision.

While we love Expensify, it’s far from a comprehensive accounting solution. And if you’re already paying for accounting software, Expensify is a fairly pricey add-on (especially since a lot of accounting software solutions already include expense tracking). Plus, if you use the free plan to track freelance expenses, make absolutely sure you don’t exceed the 25-scans-per-month limit: customers reported being automatically billed as soon as they exceed the limit and with no warning.³

Shoeboxed is an outsourced receipt-scanning company that converts paper receipts into organized digital copies. Depending on the plan you choose, Shoeboxed sends you either one prepaid envelope a month or an unlimited number of prepaid envelopes (Shoeboxed goes hard or it goes home). The Shoeboxed team then scans and uploads all your documents, sorting the receipts into one of 15 tax categories.

Shoeboxed isn’t for receipts alone. Business cards get scanned into a business directory and other documents become searchable PDFs. Additionally, you can also use the mobile app to scan and categorize receipts and business cards yourself, track miles, and add custom tax categories unique to your business.

But Shoeboxed costs more than most accounting software, which makes it hard to recommend across the board. (The cheapest plan, Startup, costs $23 a month if you pay annually or $29 when paid monthly.) For that reason, we recommend only its document scanner to business owners who want serious help getting and staying organized. Specifically, it’s best for business owners who are drowning in old paperwork, worried about the possibility of an audit, and don’t have the time to get years’ worth of old papers organized on their own.

Smart Receipts was designed for (and by) business professionals who spend a lot of time traveling for work, which is why the app stores and categorizes expenses by trip. You can photograph and upload physical receipts or generate a text receipt, where you can add comments for a more detailed explanation of what each expense entails.

But while you can export Smart Receipts’ reports in practically any format you like—PDFs, ZIPs, CSVs, and more—the app won’t automatically sync with your accounting software. Instead, when you generate an expense report, you’ll have to export it and manually add it to your QuickBooks or Xero account. It’s not too much of a hassle, but if your top priority is saving time, you might want to look elsewhere.

Evernote is one of the world’s most popular note-taking and organizing software, and its free receipt-scanning app is, by all accounts, one of the best. The more than 342K reviewers on the App Store give Evernote Scannable an astounding 4.9 out of 5 stars, praising its user-friendliness and scan quality.⁶

Unfortunately, Evernote doesn’t have a scan-specific app for Android users. But the regular Evernote app lets you photograph, digitize, and annotate any document. If you don’t mind labeling receipts yourself, you can still use Evernote for receipt categorization on your Android. (You can also use an Evernote alternative that works for Android, like Neat Receipts.) Whether you use iOS or Android, though, Evernote is for receipt scanning only—not expense categorizing. ABUKAI and Smart Receipts both work better if expense management is a higher priority for you.

If you want to whittle the time you spend generating expense reports down to, well, nothing, ABUKAI Expense is a solid pick. It’s a fairly simple, straightforward expense and receipt app, which works in its favor if simplicity is what you want: just photograph a receipt, press a button to generate a report, and get a thoroughly categorized expense report sent to your email. You can access the reports as an Excel file, but they also sync perfectly with QuickBooks.

Like Expensify, ABUKAI Expense works just as well for freelancers and individual business owners as it does for large corporations. You can run as many expense reports as you like, whether that’s one a month or dozens a week. But like we said above, ABUKAI Expense is pretty simple. It has some corporate features, but if you want all the bells and whistles, Expensify or Zoho Expense will give you more (admittedly at a higher price).

The right scanner replaces faulty old-school storage methods and sucks (some of) the panic out of audits. It simplifies bookkeeping and frees you up to focus on business activities you actually enjoy. Still not sure which receipt tracker to choose? Here are our recommendations, distilled:

• Zoho Expense is our favorite receipt-scanning software for small-business owners. Even its free plan is incredibly fully featured, giving freelancers and small-business owners a cheap way to prep for tax time and budget for the year. And its paid plans include trip planning and corporate card features, perfect for midsize businesses to international corporations.
• Expensify’s extremely user-friendly app automates almost every aspect of receipt scanning and organization, tax categorization, and expense tracking.
• If you’re looking for more than just receipt-scanning software, QuickBooks Online is a good choice. Its fully featured accounting software includes built-in receipt scanning, and its automatic tax categorization simplifies tax time for freelancers.
• Shoeboxed lets you entirely outsource your digital receipt scanning and organizing. Its IRS-approved, high-quality receipt images can help you out during an audit and help you maximize savings come tax time.
• If QuickBooks Online doesn’t fit your needs, FreshBooks is a cheaper accounting software alternative. It’s especially good for freelancers and contractors who want to attach receipts and expenses to invoices at the end of a job.

And remember that no matter which receipt scanner app you’re leaning toward, you don’t have to commit without kicking its tires first. Each provider we listed here either is free or offers a free trial.

Want bookkeeping software that supports your receipt scanner? Check out our page on the year’s best small-business accounting software. All of our top picks sync with at least one receipt-scanning app.

Not sure how to scan receipts? If you own a smartphone, you can simply take a picture of the paper receipt. Once you upload the image, you can view your receipt any time using receipt-scanning software. Receipt-scanning software works with emailed receipts too: just forward the email to your receipt-scanning software’s email address or upload the image to your accounting software yourself.

You can also use portable scanners by popular printing companies like Epson and Xerox, such as the Fujitsu ScanSnap or an Epson WorkForce scanner. You can choose from models that range from straightforward flatbed scanners to hefty desktop scanner/printer combos.

Fujitso also offers a receipt app in combination with its portable scanners. Neat Receipts used to be the biggest player in the app/printer combo game, but Neat eliminated its hardware in 2018 and went app-only. Fujitso is the best Neat scanner software alternative we’ve found so far.

Most accounting software solutions, QuickBooks included, already have built-in expense tracking and receipt scanning. (One notable exception is Xero, which unfortunately includes expense tracking with only its most expensive plan). The main reason to add separate receipt-scanning software is if your existing accounting software doesn’t have all the receipt-scanning features you need.

Most bigger companies and corporations will need separate accounting software and expense management software. Otherwise, tracking employee expenses and dealing with reimbursements can become much too complicated. But freelancers, solopreneurs, and other self-employed small-business owners who want to scan, upload, and save receipts with basic expense tracking should be fine with only accounting software.

To rate and review our top receipt-scanning brands, we looked at a dozen of the top receipt-scanning and expense-tracking brands. We also considered the top 10 accounting software solutions that include receipt scanners. We then considered each brand's strengths and weaknesses in the following categories:

• Overall user-friendliness and accessibility
• Receipt-scanning and expense-tracking features
• Pricing
• Customer service hours, modes of contact, and general company reputation

We also considered our accounting expert's opinion and advice when reviewing each software brand. We weighted each category equally to calculate our star ratings, which are subject to frequent review and may change.

Disclaimer

At Business.org, our research is meant to offer general product and service recommendations. We don't guarantee that our suggestions will work best for each individual or business, so consider your unique needs when choosing products and services.