Everything your receipts need to become records.

How the pieces fit together

Receipt apps are easy to compare by their camera screen. The more useful comparison is the record they create afterwards, because that is what you will actually rely on. ReceGuard is built around four moments, and every feature belongs to one of them.

What makes a record hold up

IRS Publication 463 sets a plain bar for documentary evidence: it should show the amount, the date, the place and the essential character of the expense. Four things. A photograph of a slip gives you three of them and leaves the fourth — why the business needed it — to memory, which is exactly the part that fails.

That is why the app asks you to confirm what it read and to write a line of purpose before filing. It takes about eight seconds per receipt and it is the difference between an archive you can rely on and a database of plausible-looking numbers. For travel, meals, gifts and vehicle use it is not optional at all: those categories require strict substantiation, and the estimation rule that rescues an ordinary expense with a missing receipt does not apply to them.

Free and Pro

The free tier is a working app, not a demo. It scans receipts with the same on-device recognition, logs mileage, exports tax packages, and needs no account. What Pro removes is the daily ceiling, and what it adds is the longer-term machinery: sync, warranty tracking, inventory, a lock, and the rest of the themes.

Note what is not behind the paywall: the recognition quality, the ability to correct it, the multi-page handling and the export. The parts that decide whether your records are trustworthy are the same on both tiers.

Records that outlive the app

Tax records have to survive longer than most software does. The IRS expects most of them to be kept three years from filing, six if income was under-reported by more than a quarter, and seven for a worthless securities or bad debt claim. Employment tax records run four years; property records run until the limitation period expires for the year you dispose of the asset.

No receipt app should ask you to bet a seven-year obligation on it still existing. That is why the export produces open formats with the images attached rather than a proprietary archive, and why we suggest pulling one every quarter and keeping it somewhere you control. If ReceGuard vanished tomorrow, those files would still be readable.

Built for one person's records

ReceGuard is a personal record-keeping app. It has no approval workflows, no company card feeds, no reimbursement routing and no general ledger. If you need staff submitting expenses for sign-off, a team expense platform exists for good reasons and you should use one — you would be paying us for an approval queue with one person in it.

What it is built for is the freelancer, contractor or sole trader who keeps their own books: someone whose receipts arrive in a pocket and an inbox, who drives to clients, and who needs all of it to make sense to an accountant once a year without a fortnight of archaeology in April.

It also does not make tax decisions. It organises records, applies published mileage rates by trip date, and groups expenses under the lines your form uses. What you claim, and whether you may, stays between you and a qualified tax professional.

Where to start

Scan one receipt from your wallet. Check the four numbers the app read back against the image, write one line about why you bought it, and save. That is the whole loop, and it takes about twenty seconds once the habit forms.

If you want to see what the finished records look like before committing, the free tools run entirely in the browser with no app at all, and the guides cover the recordkeeping rules the app is shaped around — what counts as adequate evidence, how long to keep it, and which expense categories need more than a photograph.

Common questions