The 5 Best Receipt Tracking Apps for Your Business in 2019

• Every business needs to track expenses. Receipt tracking and scanning apps make it easier.
• The best apps let you scan your receipts, then automatically transcribe the data for you.
• Most of these apps will also integrate with standard accounting software.
• Of the five best apps, our favorites are Wave and Expensify, but they all have unique benefits.
• All of them simplify accounting, but you’ll still need a bookkeeper to reconcile all of your finances.

They say you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Likewise, you can’t earn money without spending some, too. You’d be hard-pressed to find any kind of functioning business with zero overhead or other expenses. Even your local blog writer has to pay for the electricity for their laptop and food for their brain and hands. The more work and product your business generates, the more such inputs it will take. Many of those expenses are tax-deductible to some degree, so aside from the obvious bookkeeping reasons, receipt tracking is a critical business process.

The Value of Receipt Tracking Apps

There are two main reasons to invest in a receipt scanning app.

One is that almost all of the best ones available have built-in OCR (optical character recognition) and transcription features. That means saving you and your employees hours of tedious data entry. With this kind of app, you don’t have to manually copy the information down. You’ll still want to double-check that the OCR reads the receipt accurately, but even that takes just a tiny fraction of the manual entry time.

The second reason is that once you’ve scanned in your receipts, you don’t necessarily have to keep all the old paper copies around. As long as they’re backed up on the cloud, you can access them from anywhere. That’s a huge advantage in your efforts to keep your office organized!

With that in mind, most apps include these features at the basic level. Where do they each stand out and offer different advantages for you to consider?

How the 5 Best Apps Stack Up

Most of these top 5 apps not only scan and transcribe your receipts, but they also integrate with accounting software like QuickBooks. There are some quirks and unique benefits particular to each one, though.

Receipt Bank

This app includes all the features you’d expect, including integration with a number of popular accounting software systems. Overall, it’s easy to set up and use, but it’s rather expensive. This is mitigated by the fact that they offer a large range of specific pricing plans. These are based on whether you want single- or multi-user access, and how many receipts you will be processing. They also have very knowledgeable and helpful customer service.

Shoeboxed

As this company’s name implies, you can literally mail them a box of old receipts. They’ll scan them for you and send back cold, hard data. No other company offers this. They also have a scanner app so you can DIY it, but if your small business generates an outsize number of paper receipts, as much as 500 per month, for example, take a closer look. These guys are definitely worth considering, even though their top plan is the most expensive compared to other companies. They save you more raw time than anybody else.

Wave Receipts

This app is free, no matter how many employees you have using it! Unlike all of its competitors here, it also allows for both offline scanning, and separate receipt tracking for an unlimited number of businesses. We can’t think of anything more ideal for a traveling digital nomad or serial entrepreneur! There’s no live customer support option, but it more than makes up for that. The only other downside is that it only integrates with Wave’s own accounting app, but that software is also free!

Neat

If you’re already using TurboTax or H&R Block to do your company’s own taxes, this app will sync up with those software packages more easily than any other. This is also the only company on this list that offers to have someone personally verify the accuracy of your receipt transcriptions on your behalf. That service comes as part of their middle- and higher-tier subscriptions, for up to 30 or 100 receipts per month, respectively, but you can do more for additional fees.

Expensify

Overall, this app is, in our opinion, the best of the bunch. It’s not free, but it does some stuff the freebies don’t. Not only is it very much on the more affordable side anyway, but it also makes employee expense reports incredibly easy. Your people can scan their receipts, then fill out and submit an expense report without ever leaving the app. Their team and Corporate plans each offer plenty of useful features. If your organization has already grown beyond a thousand employees, consider their Enterprise plan and its offer of a dedicated Success Coach to help ensure optimal implementation. That’s the only kind of live customer support they offer, though.

Receipt Apps Supplement Bookkeeping, But Aren’t a Substitute!

With the exception of the verification service offered by Neat, all of these apps still require that someone in your organization double-check their work for accurate bookkeeping. Likewise, expenses and receipt tracking are just one facet of your company’s overall financial picture.

That’s why it’s so important to have professional bookkeepers on staff. Bookkeepers have specific financial training and experience that helps them see where money matters can improve within a company.

SyncLedgers takes it a step further. We help our clients reduce their bookkeeping costs while still providing fully transparent access and reporting for all of their company finances. That includes checking all the receipts and transcriptions these apps create. We integrate that data into your overall financial picture with ease. Contact us today to make sure you know where all of your money is!