Expensify's SmartScan reads a photographed or emailed receipt and pulls out the merchant, date, and amount automatically, usually within seconds. Forward one to receipts@expensify.com from your account email and it lands the same way. Where it gets slower is everything upstream: an employee who forgot to snap the photo before tossing the paper receipt, a vendor who only emails a PDF invoice to a shared inbox nobody's watching, or a receipt that shows up weeks after the purchase. We build the capture layer that catches those before they turn into a missing-documentation problem at month end.
SmartScan is genuinely reliable for a clean photo of a typical retail or restaurant receipt. It's noticeably less reliable on faded thermal paper, handwritten receipts, or multi-page hotel folios, and it has no way to catch a purchase that simply never got a photo taken before the paper was thrown out.
Email forwarding works well for anyone disciplined enough to use it, but most of the receipts that go missing come from channels nobody thinks to forward: a vendor's invoice that lands in a shared accounts-payable inbox, a subscription renewal charge with no receipt email at all, a purchase made by someone other than the cardholder.
The other real gap: SmartScan reads what's on the receipt, not what it should be coded to. It doesn't know which client or project a lunch should bill against unless a person tags it, which is exactly the kind of coding work that's easy to get wrong or skip under time pressure.
Shared inboxes, vendor invoice emails, and subscription charges get monitored and forwarded into Expensify automatically, so documentation doesn't depend on one person remembering to CC receipts@expensify.com.
An expense gets matched to the right project, client, or job code by checking the system where that assignment actually lives, instead of relying on an employee to tag it correctly by hand every time.
An inbox nobody checks, a subscription with no receipt at all, a cardholder who just forgets: tell us the pattern and we'll see what's catchable before it becomes a gap at close.
Receipt capture usually breaks down somewhere upstream of Expensify itself, a shared inbox nobody watches, a subscription charge with no email at all, an employee who just forgets. Point us at where yours tends to go missing and we'll look at what's realistic to catch automatically. And if receipt capture isn't the real friction in your business, that's fine too, we build automation wherever the manual work actually sits.
Let's talk →Forward the receipt to receipts@expensify.com from the email address registered on your Expensify account. SmartScan reads it automatically and adds it as an unreported expense, no app required.
SmartScan uses OCR to read a photographed or forwarded receipt and extract the merchant, date, and amount, then creates an expense from it automatically. It gets more accurate the clearer and more standard the receipt format is.
Yes, for cards connected through a supported feed, charges import automatically and can be matched to a receipt once one's been added. The receipt and the card charge are still two separate pieces of data that need to line up, which is where missing documentation shows up.
You can enter the expense manually with the amount and merchant typed in, attaching the photo anyway for the audit trail even though SmartScan couldn't parse it automatically.